The buzz: In India, film and literary artists rallied against a “colonial era” law making homosexuality a criminal offense. An open protest letter was signed by 100 influential artists, including Booker prizewinner Arundhati Roy and author Vikram Seth. The letter said the law had been used to “systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorise sexual minorities” and had spawned intolerance. Project Runway’s Tim Gunn’s first book, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Style, written with Parsons’ Kate Maloney, will be published by Abrams Image in the spring of 2007. The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve: Close Up and Personal will be published by Pegasus. HarperCollins recalled the print run of 26,500 books of The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan, after Sullivan spotted a significant production error in the text: half of the fifth chapter had been inserted into the middle of the sixth chapter. The corrected printing is expected to arrive in bookstores October 10. Steve Berman has inked a four-book deal with Haworth: three horror novels and a collection of short stories. Brent Hartinger’s novel Geography Club was named the second-most banned book by the American Booksellers Association. The top spot goes to To Kill a Mockingbird. Other books on the list include Judy Blume’s Forever and Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Laura Albert, the woman who, under the name J T LeRoy, wrote the books Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, is reported to be shopping a book proposal through her agent, weaving her personal story with the creation of her fictional alter ego. Former New Jersey governor James E. McGreevey’s memoir, The Confession, lands on The New York Times Bestseller List in the number 3 spot in the October 8, 2006 issue. Chris Crain has left his editorial positions with Window Media to relocate to Brazil with his partner. Crain remains one of the publishing company’s owners. The Advocate’s editor in chief Bruce Steele leaves the publication in October. Anne Stockwell will serve as acting editor. Sotheby’s in New York will auction more than 200 objects, including several Andy Warhol paintings, from the estate of David Whitney, the collector and curator who was the longtime companion of the architect Philip Johnson. Lorca Eran Todos (They Were All Lorca), a new play about Federico Garcia Lorca, a gay Spanish poet executed during the Spanish civil war, was canceled in Madrid after author and actor Pepe Rubianes received death threats from angry political groups. Peter Cameron’s novel, The City of Your Final Destination, has been optioned by Merchant Ivory Productions. James Ivory will direct from a script written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Shooting is scheduled to begin in October of 2006 in Argentina. South Korea has selected King and the Clown, a gay-themed movie that became an unexpected domestic box-office hit to put forward as its candidate for an Academy Award for best foreign film. The story involves a male clown caught between the affections of a despotic king and the love of a fellow performer. Volver, the new Pedro Almodovar film starring Penelope Cruz, was named the best film of the year from the International Federation of Film Critics. Actress Zooey Deschanel will play legendary singer Janis Joplin in the biopic The Gospel According to Janis set to start filming in November. And Ellen DeGeneres has been picked to host next year’s Academy Awards.
Kudos: The National Book Foundation will honor poet Adrienne Rich with the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Sarah Waters has made the Booker Prize shortlist with her novel The Night Watch. Dante Micheaux of New York City was the winner of the Fifth Annual Oscar Wilde Award for his poem “Bread Boy.” The poem is posted on Gival Press Web site and will appear in the anthology Poetic Voices Without Borders. Honorable mentions went to Teresa Stores, Julie R. Enszer, Ed Madden, and Jennifer Pruden Colligan.
Open calls: Editor Morty Diamond is looking for first person stories from trans and gender variant writers about the experiences of dating, sex, relationships, and finding love for a new anthology. Length should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words. Deadline is December 2006. Submissions can be sent to: newtransanthology@gmail.com. Editor Ellen Tevault is looking for submissions for Superqueeroes, an anthology to be published by Haworth. Deadline is February 1, 2007. Stories should be between 1500 and 6000 words. Mail stories to: Ellen Tevault, P.O. Box 199032, Indianapolis, IN 46219.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Thursday, August 31, 2006
September Publishing Notes
The buzz: TLA Releasing has acquired the distribution rights to the film version of Matthew Rettenmund’s novel, Boy Culture. The film won the Jury Award for Best Feature at the 2006 Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Jury Award for Best Screenplay at the 2006 Outfest in Los Angeles. Wolfe Releasing has acquired the home video rights to the documentary Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema. UCLA and Outfest have announced the first two feature films slated to be restored as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation: Parting Glances (1986), starring Steve Buscemi, and the groundbreaking Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1978). The Legacy Project has already established the world’s largest publicly accessible collection of LGBT films. Allegations of authorial fraud have led Antidote International Films to sue Bloomsbury Publishing in Federal Court. Antidote bought film rights to the novel Sarah, in August 2003, believing defendants’ assertion that it was an autobiographical tale of author “J.T. Leroy’s rising literary star, his celebrity, his tawdry, tragic and edgy personal history”. But in fact, “defendant Laura Albert wrote J.T. Leroy’s books, faked his biography, faked his persona, and hired her common-law husband’s half-sister Savannah to portray the androgynous young writer when it was necessary for J.T. Leroy to appear in public,” Antidote claims. Harvey Fierstein has joined the cast of NBC’s The Year Without A Santa Claus, a two-hour movie to be broadcast during the 2006 holiday season. Blythe Danner will star in an off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Willliams’ Suddenly Last Summer this fall. Douglas Carter Beane’s play, The Little Dog Laughed, about a closeted Hollywood star, will begin previews on Broadway in October. A London revival of Martin Sherman’s play Bent, starring Alan Cumming, will open in October. Instinct magazine has purchased Gay Travel News. In October, the Houston GLBT Community Center will debut Montrose, an online journal featuring writing and art by local GLBT talent. A new bookstore in Indianapolis, A Shade of Gray, opened two months ago focusing on books for women, people of color, and the gay community. Limited and deluxe editions of Treasures of Gay Art from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, edited by Peter Weiermair and with essays by James Saslow and Allen Ellenzweig, along with 180 full color page reproductions, is now available by special order. Visit the Leslie/Lohman Foundation for more details.
Kudos: Sara Waters latest novel, The Night Watch, has made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Michael Cunningham’s novella, “In the Machine” from Specimen Days, has been nominated for a 2006 World Fantasy Award. James Purdy and Vestal McIntyre were among the authors receiving fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2006. Actor and author Leslie Jordan took home an Emmy Award for Best Guest Actor for his role on NBC’s Will & Grace.
Open calls: Blithe House Quarterly is currently accepting submissions for its Spring 2007 issue. Stories should be previously unpublished and no more than 7500 words in length. E-mail submissions to adalvarez@aol.com. Lee Hayes is editing Flesh to Flesh, a gay erotic anthology for Books/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster. Stories should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words. Deadline is November 1, 2006. All submissions must be sent to: Strebor Books International, Attn: Lee Hayes, P.O. Box 6505, Largo, MD 20792. Alyson and editor Sean Fisher are assembling Dorm Porn 2: More Steamy Tales of Men on Campus. Stories should be between 2,500 and 4,000 words. Deadline is September 15, 2006. E-mail submissions to erotica@alyson.com. Journalist Charles Michael Smith is looking for material for At the Old Place: A Gay & Lesbian Bar Anthology. The book will acknowledge and explore the many facets of gay and lesbian bar life as well as emphasize the importance of these establishments to the community over the years. Topics will include how to choose a bar, how to cruise in a bar, gay bars of the past, backroom-bar experiences, alcoholism in the gay community, my first time in a gay or lesbian bar, the bar in gay literature, the emergence of bar ‘zines like New York’s Homo Xtra, and gay bars across the United States and in foreign countries. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Send submissions in duplicate to: Charles Michael Smith, 1864 7th Avenue, Apt. #4, New York, NY 10026.
Kudos: Sara Waters latest novel, The Night Watch, has made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Michael Cunningham’s novella, “In the Machine” from Specimen Days, has been nominated for a 2006 World Fantasy Award. James Purdy and Vestal McIntyre were among the authors receiving fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2006. Actor and author Leslie Jordan took home an Emmy Award for Best Guest Actor for his role on NBC’s Will & Grace.
Open calls: Blithe House Quarterly is currently accepting submissions for its Spring 2007 issue. Stories should be previously unpublished and no more than 7500 words in length. E-mail submissions to adalvarez@aol.com. Lee Hayes is editing Flesh to Flesh, a gay erotic anthology for Books/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster. Stories should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words. Deadline is November 1, 2006. All submissions must be sent to: Strebor Books International, Attn: Lee Hayes, P.O. Box 6505, Largo, MD 20792. Alyson and editor Sean Fisher are assembling Dorm Porn 2: More Steamy Tales of Men on Campus. Stories should be between 2,500 and 4,000 words. Deadline is September 15, 2006. E-mail submissions to erotica@alyson.com. Journalist Charles Michael Smith is looking for material for At the Old Place: A Gay & Lesbian Bar Anthology. The book will acknowledge and explore the many facets of gay and lesbian bar life as well as emphasize the importance of these establishments to the community over the years. Topics will include how to choose a bar, how to cruise in a bar, gay bars of the past, backroom-bar experiences, alcoholism in the gay community, my first time in a gay or lesbian bar, the bar in gay literature, the emergence of bar ‘zines like New York’s Homo Xtra, and gay bars across the United States and in foreign countries. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Send submissions in duplicate to: Charles Michael Smith, 1864 7th Avenue, Apt. #4, New York, NY 10026.
Monday, July 31, 2006
August Publishing Notes
The buzz: Christine Baranski, George Grizzard, Stan Phillips, and Jackie Hoffman will headline Paul Rudnick’s new play, Regrets Only, premiering October at New York City Center. Charles Busch will host the New York Innovative Theatre Awards on September 18, honoring achievement in off-off-Broadway theater. Arch Brown has launched the Thorny Theater, a new LGBT theater located in Palm Springs, CA. Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, currently producing the movie version of Hairspray, are planning a revival of Peter Pan for ABC TV in late 2007. Gay author and actor Stephen Frey will reveal his struggle with depression and suicide contemplation in a new BBC documentary later this year, The Secret Life of A Manic Depressive. China has banned South Korea’s immensely popular movie, King and the Clown, because of its subtle gay themes. The government of Turkey recently shut down the gay magazine Kaos GL citing "general morality" after the magazine included an article entitled "Visuality of Sexuality, Sexuality of Visuality: Pornography" in their latest issue. Grove/Atlantic will publish Charles Kaiser’s The Cost of Courage: A Family Divided by the French Resistance, which follows the true story of a family on an unpredictable journey through Nazi-occupied Paris, four German concentration camps, and the labyrinth of their emotions after World War II. In bookstores soon: Christopher Bram’s new novel, Exiles in America, Stephen Beachy’s novellas, Some Phantom/No Time Flat, Jeff Mann’s collection of erotica, A History of Barbed Wire, Anthony Bidulka’s new mystery Tapas on the Ramblas, Richard Grayson’s Highly Irregular Stories, and Toby Johnson’s novel, Two Spirits, A Story of Life with the Navajo. Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Atlanta was the target of several anti-gay protests during June and July. Customers and activists rallied behind the bookstore and staged counter-protests. Haworth Press, the popular publisher of gay books and journals, was unexpectedly closed for a week in July 2006 due to the flooding that affected the mid-Atlantic area. Located in Binghamton, NY, the press has an account of the flood on its Web site.
Kudos: Ivey Banks, the nom-de-plume of Dora McAlpin-Zeeks, a mother in Odenton, Maryland, won The Next Big Writer, the online novel-writing contest, for her gay-themed novel Out of the Dark, in which teenager Thorn MacDonnell struggles with his sexuality and the fact that he has been diagnosed with HIV and leukemia. The winning prize carries a $5000 award. Lesley C. Weston, head of costume design for The New York City Opera, was runner-up for the novel, Nancy Boy. Q. Allen Brocka and Phillip Pierce took the outstanding screenwriting prize at L.A. Outfest for their screenplay adaptation of Matthew Rettendmund’s novel Boy Culture. Gay friendly Kathy Griffin was nominated for an Emmy for My Life on the D-List. Also garnering an Emmy nod was South Park’s Tom Cruise-centered episode “Trapped in the Closet” for Outstanding Animated Program.
Open calls: Kevin Bentley and Green Candy Press are looking for essays for Sex by the Book: Tales of Lit and Lust. Deadline is October 30, 2006 and submissions should be sent to Green Candy Press, 601 Van Ness Avenue, E-918, San Francisco, CA 94102. Jolie du Pre is looking for submissions for Iridescence: Lovely Shades of Lesbian Erotica forthcoming from Alyson. Deadline is August 31, 2006 and should be sent to womenofcolor@ameritech.net. Gayfest NYC producers Bruce Robert Harris and Jack W. Batman are now accepting submissions for the Festival of New Plays and Musicals to be presented in New York City, May 9-June 2, 2007. The Festival will feature three Main Stage productions, a Studio reading series of new works, guest speakers, talk-backs and other events. Two plays and one musical will be selected for fully-produced Main Stage productions with Actors’ Equity Association casts and professional directors and staff personnel. Work should deal with LGBT characters or issues in some literal or metaphorical way. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Mail two copies of script and one copy of score (on CD only) to: GAYFEST NYC, c/o Bruce Robert Harris, One River Place, Suite 917, New York, NY 10036. To commemorate this year's World AIDS Day observance on December 1 at the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, the memorial's board of directors is asking the public for personal testimonies, remembrances, and reflections on the effects of the AIDS pandemic. In keeping with the event’s theme, “AIDS at 25,” the memorial is asking people to identify a single year since 1981 and explain how the pandemic affected them during that year. "This could be a recollection of your own or a loved one's experiences in dealing with AIDS, or remembering the wide swath the disease made in those early years when there were no medications," said Jack Porter, co-chairman of the World AIDS Day observance, in a press statement. "Or it could be related to learning of your own diagnosis or that of a loved one in the last couple years; a visit to an AIDS-stricken African village; or a poignant moment in your work with a client of an AIDS service agency." Submissions should be submitted by September 15 via e-mail to mystory@aidsmemorial.org or by standard mail to the National AIDS Memorial, 856 Stanyan St., San Francisco, CA, 94117. The remembrance service will be held December 1 at the memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Kudos: Ivey Banks, the nom-de-plume of Dora McAlpin-Zeeks, a mother in Odenton, Maryland, won The Next Big Writer, the online novel-writing contest, for her gay-themed novel Out of the Dark, in which teenager Thorn MacDonnell struggles with his sexuality and the fact that he has been diagnosed with HIV and leukemia. The winning prize carries a $5000 award. Lesley C. Weston, head of costume design for The New York City Opera, was runner-up for the novel, Nancy Boy. Q. Allen Brocka and Phillip Pierce took the outstanding screenwriting prize at L.A. Outfest for their screenplay adaptation of Matthew Rettendmund’s novel Boy Culture. Gay friendly Kathy Griffin was nominated for an Emmy for My Life on the D-List. Also garnering an Emmy nod was South Park’s Tom Cruise-centered episode “Trapped in the Closet” for Outstanding Animated Program.
Open calls: Kevin Bentley and Green Candy Press are looking for essays for Sex by the Book: Tales of Lit and Lust. Deadline is October 30, 2006 and submissions should be sent to Green Candy Press, 601 Van Ness Avenue, E-918, San Francisco, CA 94102. Jolie du Pre is looking for submissions for Iridescence: Lovely Shades of Lesbian Erotica forthcoming from Alyson. Deadline is August 31, 2006 and should be sent to womenofcolor@ameritech.net. Gayfest NYC producers Bruce Robert Harris and Jack W. Batman are now accepting submissions for the Festival of New Plays and Musicals to be presented in New York City, May 9-June 2, 2007. The Festival will feature three Main Stage productions, a Studio reading series of new works, guest speakers, talk-backs and other events. Two plays and one musical will be selected for fully-produced Main Stage productions with Actors’ Equity Association casts and professional directors and staff personnel. Work should deal with LGBT characters or issues in some literal or metaphorical way. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Mail two copies of script and one copy of score (on CD only) to: GAYFEST NYC, c/o Bruce Robert Harris, One River Place, Suite 917, New York, NY 10036. To commemorate this year's World AIDS Day observance on December 1 at the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, the memorial's board of directors is asking the public for personal testimonies, remembrances, and reflections on the effects of the AIDS pandemic. In keeping with the event’s theme, “AIDS at 25,” the memorial is asking people to identify a single year since 1981 and explain how the pandemic affected them during that year. "This could be a recollection of your own or a loved one's experiences in dealing with AIDS, or remembering the wide swath the disease made in those early years when there were no medications," said Jack Porter, co-chairman of the World AIDS Day observance, in a press statement. "Or it could be related to learning of your own diagnosis or that of a loved one in the last couple years; a visit to an AIDS-stricken African village; or a poignant moment in your work with a client of an AIDS service agency." Submissions should be submitted by September 15 via e-mail to mystory@aidsmemorial.org or by standard mail to the National AIDS Memorial, 856 Stanyan St., San Francisco, CA, 94117. The remembrance service will be held December 1 at the memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
July Publishing Notes
The buzz: Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel (currently untitled), an elegiac multigenerational family saga about an affluent English family, will be published by Bloomsbury in August 2008. Crown will publish Brett Berk’s The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. Pulitzer prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) has assembled an anthology of Greatest Love Stories of All Time, which will be published by Harper. The late sci-fi author Octavia Butler was honored with a tribute at the New York Public Library on June 5. Her mentor, author Samuel R. Delaney, was among the guests offering reminisces. Toni Amato has started a new LJ community, called whwn, as the first Write Here Write Now online writer's workshop. http://community.livejournal.com/whwn/. David Hockney’s 1966 painting, “The Splash,” sold for £2.6 million. Books Inc. will take over the space of the former A Clean Well-Lighted Space in San Francisco. The Peppertree Bookstore in Palm Springs is opening a second store in La Quinta. O, Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, scoured a coup by publishing a letter from the reclusive Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town. The world premier of Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, a biopic about writer Truman Capote, will open the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in August. Johnny Depp is being considered for the title role of Tim Burton’s film adaptation of the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd. The New York Post reported that Brendan Fraser has been cast as legendary gay designer Halston in an upcoming biopic. Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard are in negotiations to star in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 gay-themed novel. Bryan Singer, the openly gay director of Superman Returns, will direct the upcoming Harvey Milk biopic, The Mayor of Castro Street, based on Randy Shilts’ award-winning book. Here television is developing a new film with a screenplay by Chastity Bono and Garth Belcon titled In the Name of Love, about a lesbian troubled by heterosexual dreams. The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society announced the launch of its own YouTube channel in June. The channel will build a growing archive of historical GLBT video clips that will be accessible to the public. ThinkFilm will distribute John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, which recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In June the Logo network acquired three popular gay and lesbian news-entertainment sites as part of its continuing efforts to target online queer audiences. AfterEllen.com, AfterElton.com, and 365gay.com have joined the Web portfolio of the MTV-owned gay cable channel. Logo has also put into development a series based on Del Shores popular play and cult movie, Sordid Lives.
Kudos: Colm Toibin was named the recipient of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest literary prize, for his novel The Master. The Queer Foundation 2006 Queer Scholars are: Jason Brown of San Francisco State University, Julianne Maynus of Rhode Island College, and Scarlett Sieber of Fordham University. Educators are encouraged to download the essays from http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/qfessays2006/ for use in the classroom.
Open calls: Richard Labonté is looking for stories for a new anthology for Cleis Press: Country Boys: Dirty Gay Erotica. Stories should have a physically rural setting and/or an emotionally rural mindset. Deadline is September 1, 2006. Original stories preferred but reprints will be considered. Maximum length 7,000 words. E-mail submissions and queries to tattyhill@gmail.com.
Not a Queer Issue: Gay leaders thought an arsonist was making a political statement by setting a fire in Chicago that destroyed nearly 80 books in the Merlo Branch library’s gay and lesbian collection on June 13. According to the local police, it appears they guessed the wrong cause. The police said Erica Graham, 21, who is homeless, was protesting the library's treatment of homeless people when she started the fire. That the books burned were mainly about gays and lesbians turned out to be a coincidence, police said. Seventy-seven books from the gay and lesbian collection and 23 books from the African-American collection were destroyed. "We're happy they found the person who did it, and we're happy it doesn't appear to be a hate crime," Rick Garcia, a head of the gay rights group Equality Illinois told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. "The gay community has made great gains in the last 20 years. But you don't have to scratch too far below the surface to find anti-gay sentiment."
This Guy’s Just Interested in the Illustrations: Randy Jackson, an Idaho man checked out The Joy of Gay Sex from his local library in Nampa to protest a recent library board decision to keep the book on the shelf. Several news articles reported that he has no intention of returning the book to the library. In June the library board voted 3–1 to keep the books in circulation but place them on higher shelves and routinely sweep the library to make sure they are not lying around. There has been no word on whether the library plans to fine Jackson for the overdue book or whether it will buy a replacement copy.
Three Discoveries: During the spring, works by three writers came to my attention that I can highly recommend, one is Richard Grayson’s surreal and thought-provoking short story, “With Hitler in New York,” which was also the title of a collection of his short stories that were published in the late 1970s and which has been recently reissued. In the story, “Hitler” becomes a stand-in for the alienation and discrimination many Germans felt in the decades after the war. The story is readable on-line via a link on Grayson's Web Site. (http://www.richardgrayson.com/) Grayson also has an impressive political background (in the 1980s he was a Presidential candidate), but it is his short fiction that intrigues me most. His other collections worth exploring are Let Slip the Dogs of War, Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog and Other Stories, and his most recent collection, And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street. Another re-isssued work came my way recently, Toby Johnson’s superb gay-themed science fiction novel, Secret Matter. Johnson, a former Catholic monk and San Francisco hippie who became a noted religion scholar and editor of the White Crane Journal, is also the author of two superb non-fiction books, Gay Spirituality and Gay Perspective, but it is Johnson’s utopian and romantic vision that makes Secret Matter such a compelling read. The novel is set in San Francisco in the immediate future, just after a destructive earthquake, when a race of alien Visitors arrive. Secret Matter was the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Science Fiction and has been nominated for the Gaylaxicon Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame. More on the novel and the author can be found at Johnson’s Web site, http://www.tobyjohnson.com/. I was a fan of Wayne Hoffman’s long before he recently published his first novel; in the late 1990s we worked together at The New York Blade News. I was always impressed by Wayne’s sharp observations of popular culture (at the time, he was the Arts Editor), but it was also obvious to me that he had a clear and passionate interest in the field of sexual politics (he was also one of the co-editors of the anthology Policing Public Sex). Hoffman has set his extraordinary first novel, Hard, in New York City in the mid-1990s, at a time when the city government was cracking down on public sex venues. While the novel is a complex weave of situations and scenes, the primary conflict is between two gay journalists: one, an AIDS widower who wants to see all the sex clubs and adult theaters shut down, and the other, a young and sex-positive activist who wants to keep them open. Hoffman’s details of the city and the gay community of this era are superb (and he does present a “community” – from buff-bod hustlers to hunky bears to HIV-positive ex-lovers). While the political construct is what makes this novel so unique in gay fiction, it is Hoffman’s dead-on descriptions (witty and wise) of his characters’ sexual psyche that make it soar. (One character, in fact, runs a delightful cost-analysis on how much his search for sex costs him.) But I am also happy to report, that while Hard is political, sexy, comic, and full of social-consciousness, it is also encased in a surprising romantic yearning. More on Wayne and his book can be found at www.hardthenovel.com.
Passages: Eric Rofes, an educator, author and gay rights activist, died June 26, 2006 in Provincetown, Mass. He was 51. A Boston native who currently lived in San Francisco, Rofes had been working on a book when he was discovered dead. Rofes wrote or edited 12 books, some of which provoked controversy, among them Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1995), Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (1998), and most recently, A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling : Status Quo or Status Queer? (Curriculum, Cultures, and (Homo)Sexualities) (2005). Rofes was born on Aug. 31, 1954, in Brooklyn. He grew up in Commack on Long Island and graduated from Harvard in 1976. In the 1970's, he was one of the so-called “Boston Mafia” who founded the Gay Community News and the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. In 1985, he was hired as executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. After moving to San Francisco in 1989, he headed the Shanti Project, an AIDS service group. Rofes received his master's from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and his doctorate in 1998. He had taught at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., since 1999. Surviving are his partner of 16 years, Crispin Hollings of San Francisco; a brother, Peter, of Milwaukee; and a sister, Paula Casey-Rofes.
Ralph Paul Gernhardt, a pioneering publisher who cofounded Gay Chicago magazine three decades ago, died in June 4, 2006, of lung cancer. He was 72. Gernhardt started a telephone hotline offering a recorded message about gay-friendly parties and clubs in 1972. The line's popularity convinced him that he had found a niche that was being underserved, so he cofounded Gay Chicago in 1976. He is survived by his son, Craig—who now publishes Gay Chicago—a daughter, two sisters, and three grandchildren.
Kudos: Colm Toibin was named the recipient of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest literary prize, for his novel The Master. The Queer Foundation 2006 Queer Scholars are: Jason Brown of San Francisco State University, Julianne Maynus of Rhode Island College, and Scarlett Sieber of Fordham University. Educators are encouraged to download the essays from http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/qfessays2006/ for use in the classroom.
Open calls: Richard Labonté is looking for stories for a new anthology for Cleis Press: Country Boys: Dirty Gay Erotica. Stories should have a physically rural setting and/or an emotionally rural mindset. Deadline is September 1, 2006. Original stories preferred but reprints will be considered. Maximum length 7,000 words. E-mail submissions and queries to tattyhill@gmail.com.
Not a Queer Issue: Gay leaders thought an arsonist was making a political statement by setting a fire in Chicago that destroyed nearly 80 books in the Merlo Branch library’s gay and lesbian collection on June 13. According to the local police, it appears they guessed the wrong cause. The police said Erica Graham, 21, who is homeless, was protesting the library's treatment of homeless people when she started the fire. That the books burned were mainly about gays and lesbians turned out to be a coincidence, police said. Seventy-seven books from the gay and lesbian collection and 23 books from the African-American collection were destroyed. "We're happy they found the person who did it, and we're happy it doesn't appear to be a hate crime," Rick Garcia, a head of the gay rights group Equality Illinois told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. "The gay community has made great gains in the last 20 years. But you don't have to scratch too far below the surface to find anti-gay sentiment."
This Guy’s Just Interested in the Illustrations: Randy Jackson, an Idaho man checked out The Joy of Gay Sex from his local library in Nampa to protest a recent library board decision to keep the book on the shelf. Several news articles reported that he has no intention of returning the book to the library. In June the library board voted 3–1 to keep the books in circulation but place them on higher shelves and routinely sweep the library to make sure they are not lying around. There has been no word on whether the library plans to fine Jackson for the overdue book or whether it will buy a replacement copy.
Three Discoveries: During the spring, works by three writers came to my attention that I can highly recommend, one is Richard Grayson’s surreal and thought-provoking short story, “With Hitler in New York,” which was also the title of a collection of his short stories that were published in the late 1970s and which has been recently reissued. In the story, “Hitler” becomes a stand-in for the alienation and discrimination many Germans felt in the decades after the war. The story is readable on-line via a link on Grayson's Web Site. (http://www.richardgrayson.com/) Grayson also has an impressive political background (in the 1980s he was a Presidential candidate), but it is his short fiction that intrigues me most. His other collections worth exploring are Let Slip the Dogs of War, Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog and Other Stories, and his most recent collection, And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street. Another re-isssued work came my way recently, Toby Johnson’s superb gay-themed science fiction novel, Secret Matter. Johnson, a former Catholic monk and San Francisco hippie who became a noted religion scholar and editor of the White Crane Journal, is also the author of two superb non-fiction books, Gay Spirituality and Gay Perspective, but it is Johnson’s utopian and romantic vision that makes Secret Matter such a compelling read. The novel is set in San Francisco in the immediate future, just after a destructive earthquake, when a race of alien Visitors arrive. Secret Matter was the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Science Fiction and has been nominated for the Gaylaxicon Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame. More on the novel and the author can be found at Johnson’s Web site, http://www.tobyjohnson.com/. I was a fan of Wayne Hoffman’s long before he recently published his first novel; in the late 1990s we worked together at The New York Blade News. I was always impressed by Wayne’s sharp observations of popular culture (at the time, he was the Arts Editor), but it was also obvious to me that he had a clear and passionate interest in the field of sexual politics (he was also one of the co-editors of the anthology Policing Public Sex). Hoffman has set his extraordinary first novel, Hard, in New York City in the mid-1990s, at a time when the city government was cracking down on public sex venues. While the novel is a complex weave of situations and scenes, the primary conflict is between two gay journalists: one, an AIDS widower who wants to see all the sex clubs and adult theaters shut down, and the other, a young and sex-positive activist who wants to keep them open. Hoffman’s details of the city and the gay community of this era are superb (and he does present a “community” – from buff-bod hustlers to hunky bears to HIV-positive ex-lovers). While the political construct is what makes this novel so unique in gay fiction, it is Hoffman’s dead-on descriptions (witty and wise) of his characters’ sexual psyche that make it soar. (One character, in fact, runs a delightful cost-analysis on how much his search for sex costs him.) But I am also happy to report, that while Hard is political, sexy, comic, and full of social-consciousness, it is also encased in a surprising romantic yearning. More on Wayne and his book can be found at www.hardthenovel.com.
Passages: Eric Rofes, an educator, author and gay rights activist, died June 26, 2006 in Provincetown, Mass. He was 51. A Boston native who currently lived in San Francisco, Rofes had been working on a book when he was discovered dead. Rofes wrote or edited 12 books, some of which provoked controversy, among them Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1995), Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (1998), and most recently, A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling : Status Quo or Status Queer? (Curriculum, Cultures, and (Homo)Sexualities) (2005). Rofes was born on Aug. 31, 1954, in Brooklyn. He grew up in Commack on Long Island and graduated from Harvard in 1976. In the 1970's, he was one of the so-called “Boston Mafia” who founded the Gay Community News and the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. In 1985, he was hired as executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. After moving to San Francisco in 1989, he headed the Shanti Project, an AIDS service group. Rofes received his master's from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and his doctorate in 1998. He had taught at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., since 1999. Surviving are his partner of 16 years, Crispin Hollings of San Francisco; a brother, Peter, of Milwaukee; and a sister, Paula Casey-Rofes.
Ralph Paul Gernhardt, a pioneering publisher who cofounded Gay Chicago magazine three decades ago, died in June 4, 2006, of lung cancer. He was 72. Gernhardt started a telephone hotline offering a recorded message about gay-friendly parties and clubs in 1972. The line's popularity convinced him that he had found a niche that was being underserved, so he cofounded Gay Chicago in 1976. He is survived by his son, Craig—who now publishes Gay Chicago—a daughter, two sisters, and three grandchildren.
Monday, June 05, 2006
June Publishing Notes
The buzz: The twenty-six year old North Carolina gay newspaper The Front Page has been bought by the Charlotte based Q Notes. Former editor and publisher Jim Baxter will continue to work out of the back office of the White Rabbit bookstore in Raleigh and write for the expanded Q Notes. One of San Francisco’s best bookstores, Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, is looking for a buyer. Creative Visions, the former Greenwich Village bookstore, is now open in cyberspace at http://www.gaypleasures.com/. Everybody Reads, a new bookstore in Lansing, Michigan, that opened in May, carries general books, but owner Scott Harris focuses on "what he calls underserved groups, such as single parents, minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and children," the Lansing State Journal reported. The store offers a free meeting space and a book exchange. A grand opening is scheduled for Saturday, June 17. Everybody Reads is located at 2019 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing, Mich. 48912; 517-346-9900. The Minnesota-based Graywolf Press, which has published many distinguished queer writers and books, is opening a Manhattan office. Here! Networks bought H.I.M. (Hyperion Interactive Media) which runs a collection of more than 20 portals and Web sites, including LesbiaNation.com and GayWired.com. The gay cable channel Q Television has gone dark. Queen Latifah has signed to play an AIDS Activist in the upcoming movie Life Support, which focuses on the impact of HIV in the African American community. Author Keith Boykin is now a host of the BET television show My Two Cents. Simon and Schuster will publish Bil Wright’s new young adult title, When the Black Girl Sings. An author’s note now appears in the paperback edition of My Friend Leonard, James Frey’s gay friendly sequel to A Million Little Pieces. (“To call this book pure nonfiction would be inaccurate," the author writes. "It is a combination of fact and fiction, real and imagined events.") DC Comics is resurrecting Batwoman as a lesbian. The Color Purple: A Memory Book, an illustrated companion to the Broadway musical, with a foreward by Oprah Winfrey, will be published by Carroll & Graf this fall. The opera version of Angels in America will make its American debut in June in Boston. Terence McNally, who has the gay-themed play Some Men on the Manhattan horizon, is also writing the book for a musical version of the film Catch Me If You Can. The Broadway Lestat is dust, but Elton John is adapting Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as a musical. And Andrew Davies has adapted Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty for BBC TV.
Pink Ink: The Publishing Triangle’s Pink Ink gets underway in Manhattan on June 10th and 11th. For a full listing of workshops, panel discussions, readings, and book fairs, visit the Triangle’s Web site at www.publishingtriangle.org.
Kudos: Lee Lynch, Steven Saylor, J.M. Redmann, and the Harrington Park Press were inaugurated into the annual Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame during the literary festival in May in New Orleans. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City was the winner of Britain’s Big Gay Read. The winners of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants in playwriting are: First Prize ($1,000): David Alan Moore of Chicago IL for In Times of War and David Brendan Hopes of Asheville, NC for St. Patrick’s Well and Anna Livia: Lucky in her Bridges; Second Prize ($500): Jordan Harrison of Bainbridge Island, WA for Act a Lady. Third Prize ($250): Anton Dudley of Brooklyn, NY for The Lake’s End, Brian Quirk of New York, NY for Mapplethorpe: The Opening, James Still of Venice, CA for Iron Kisses, and Brian Sloan of New York, NY for WTC View. Richard McCann’s novel, Mother of Sorrows, was the winner of Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Among the nominees for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play was Lisa Kron for Well. And in May the Obies presented playwright Eric Bentley with a Lifetime Achievement award.
Publishing Triangle Awards: The 18th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2005, were presented May 11th at the Tishman Auditorium of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Historian Karla Jay received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the longtime independent bookstore in Greenwich Village, received a special Leadership Award. The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction went to Tania Katan for My One-Night Stand with Cancer (Alyson Books). The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction went to Martin Moran for The Tricky Part (Beacon Press). The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry went to Richard Siken for Crush (Yale University Press). The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry went to Jane Miller for A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon). The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Gay Men’s Fiction went to Barry McCrea for The First Verse (Carroll & Graf). The Lesbian Fiction Award went to Patricia Grossman for Brian in Three Seasons (Permanent Press). This year the Publishing Triangle inaugurated a new literary award, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Mack Friedman was the winner for Setting the Lawn on Fire (University of Wisconsin Press). And the Robert Chesley Foundation presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Megan Terry and an Emerging Artist award to Kathleen Warnock.
Lambda Literary Awards: The 18th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were presented May 18th in Washington, D.C. The winners were: Anthology: Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men's Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf). Belles Lettres: The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) . Biography: February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin). Children's/Young Adult: Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books). Erotica: Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Gay Men's Debut Fiction: You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Fiction: The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Mystery: One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts). Gay Men's Poetry: Crush by Richard Siken (Yale). Humor: Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday). Lesbian Debut Fiction: The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts). Lesbian Fiction: Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) and Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys (W. W. Norton). Lesbian Mystery: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Arte Publico). Lesbian Poetry: Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon). LGBT Studies: When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman. Nonfiction: Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota). Romance: Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror: Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books). Spirituality: Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press). Transgender/GenderQueer: Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press). Congressman Barney Frank received the Bridge Builder Award, but because of voting during the last session of Congress, he was unable to attend. His legislative aide, Joseph Racalto, accepted on his behalf.
Open calls: Chroma, the queer British literary journal, is sponsoring an International Short Story and Poetry Competition. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details visit the Web site chromajournal.co.uk. RedBone Press seeks well-written personal stories by black lesbians on the subject of coming out while married to a man. Deadline is November 3, 2006. E-mail redbonepress@yahoo.com for more details. Amie M. Evans and Trebor Healey are editing an anthology on being Queer and Catholic for Haworth Press scheduled for mid-2007. Deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006 and should be sent to Amie M. Evans/Trebor Healey, 33 Campbell Street, Woburn, Ma 01801. Lorie Selke is looking for stories for Tough Girls: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica Volume 2. Deadline is October 1, 2006. E-mail selk@io.com for more details. Lynn Jamneck of New Zealand is looking for stories for her anthology of lesbian sleuths and the supernatural. Submission period is through November 2006. Query superantho@gmail for more details. JoSelle Vanderhooft is looking for stories for Tiresias Revisited: Magical Tales for Transfolk. Deadline is October 1, 2006. Mail stories to: Tiresias Revisited, c/o JoSelle Vanderhooft, PO Box 1921, Sandy, Utah 84091-1921. Yaoi Press is currently looking for comic book scripts for their adults only Hentai series. For more details visit www.yaoipress.com.
Passages: Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the screen adaptation of Cabaret as well as the play Tru, the one-man show about Truman Capote, died May 1, 2006, of a stroke, at her home in New York City. She was 84. Her other screenplays include Deathtrap, Marnie, Travels with My Aunt, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Forty Carats, and Funny Lady. She was married to producer Lewis Allen from 1955 to 2003.
Pink Ink: The Publishing Triangle’s Pink Ink gets underway in Manhattan on June 10th and 11th. For a full listing of workshops, panel discussions, readings, and book fairs, visit the Triangle’s Web site at www.publishingtriangle.org.
Kudos: Lee Lynch, Steven Saylor, J.M. Redmann, and the Harrington Park Press were inaugurated into the annual Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame during the literary festival in May in New Orleans. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City was the winner of Britain’s Big Gay Read. The winners of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants in playwriting are: First Prize ($1,000): David Alan Moore of Chicago IL for In Times of War and David Brendan Hopes of Asheville, NC for St. Patrick’s Well and Anna Livia: Lucky in her Bridges; Second Prize ($500): Jordan Harrison of Bainbridge Island, WA for Act a Lady. Third Prize ($250): Anton Dudley of Brooklyn, NY for The Lake’s End, Brian Quirk of New York, NY for Mapplethorpe: The Opening, James Still of Venice, CA for Iron Kisses, and Brian Sloan of New York, NY for WTC View. Richard McCann’s novel, Mother of Sorrows, was the winner of Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Among the nominees for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play was Lisa Kron for Well. And in May the Obies presented playwright Eric Bentley with a Lifetime Achievement award.
Publishing Triangle Awards: The 18th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2005, were presented May 11th at the Tishman Auditorium of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Historian Karla Jay received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the longtime independent bookstore in Greenwich Village, received a special Leadership Award. The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction went to Tania Katan for My One-Night Stand with Cancer (Alyson Books). The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction went to Martin Moran for The Tricky Part (Beacon Press). The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry went to Richard Siken for Crush (Yale University Press). The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry went to Jane Miller for A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon). The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Gay Men’s Fiction went to Barry McCrea for The First Verse (Carroll & Graf). The Lesbian Fiction Award went to Patricia Grossman for Brian in Three Seasons (Permanent Press). This year the Publishing Triangle inaugurated a new literary award, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Mack Friedman was the winner for Setting the Lawn on Fire (University of Wisconsin Press). And the Robert Chesley Foundation presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Megan Terry and an Emerging Artist award to Kathleen Warnock.
Lambda Literary Awards: The 18th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were presented May 18th in Washington, D.C. The winners were: Anthology: Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men's Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf). Belles Lettres: The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) . Biography: February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin). Children's/Young Adult: Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books). Erotica: Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Gay Men's Debut Fiction: You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Fiction: The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Mystery: One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts). Gay Men's Poetry: Crush by Richard Siken (Yale). Humor: Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday). Lesbian Debut Fiction: The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts). Lesbian Fiction: Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) and Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys (W. W. Norton). Lesbian Mystery: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Arte Publico). Lesbian Poetry: Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon). LGBT Studies: When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman. Nonfiction: Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota). Romance: Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror: Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books). Spirituality: Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press). Transgender/GenderQueer: Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press). Congressman Barney Frank received the Bridge Builder Award, but because of voting during the last session of Congress, he was unable to attend. His legislative aide, Joseph Racalto, accepted on his behalf.
Open calls: Chroma, the queer British literary journal, is sponsoring an International Short Story and Poetry Competition. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details visit the Web site chromajournal.co.uk. RedBone Press seeks well-written personal stories by black lesbians on the subject of coming out while married to a man. Deadline is November 3, 2006. E-mail redbonepress@yahoo.com for more details. Amie M. Evans and Trebor Healey are editing an anthology on being Queer and Catholic for Haworth Press scheduled for mid-2007. Deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006 and should be sent to Amie M. Evans/Trebor Healey, 33 Campbell Street, Woburn, Ma 01801. Lorie Selke is looking for stories for Tough Girls: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica Volume 2. Deadline is October 1, 2006. E-mail selk@io.com for more details. Lynn Jamneck of New Zealand is looking for stories for her anthology of lesbian sleuths and the supernatural. Submission period is through November 2006. Query superantho@gmail for more details. JoSelle Vanderhooft is looking for stories for Tiresias Revisited: Magical Tales for Transfolk. Deadline is October 1, 2006. Mail stories to: Tiresias Revisited, c/o JoSelle Vanderhooft, PO Box 1921, Sandy, Utah 84091-1921. Yaoi Press is currently looking for comic book scripts for their adults only Hentai series. For more details visit www.yaoipress.com.
Passages: Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the screen adaptation of Cabaret as well as the play Tru, the one-man show about Truman Capote, died May 1, 2006, of a stroke, at her home in New York City. She was 84. Her other screenplays include Deathtrap, Marnie, Travels with My Aunt, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Forty Carats, and Funny Lady. She was married to producer Lewis Allen from 1955 to 2003.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
May Publishing Notes
The buzz: The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art and Foundation and Gallery premieres their new exhibition space in Soho this month at 26 Wooster Street. Letters and rare family photos of Truman Capote are now on permanent display in the restored Old Courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, where the author spent his childhood. Aaron Hicklin, editor in chief of BlackBook, has taken over the role of editor in chief of Out. Christie Hefner, chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, is eyeing the gay market, with a launch targeted first in the UK. Samuel R. Delaney is one of the featured writers this summer at the 2006 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in East Lansing Michigan. Achy Obejas will teach a fiction workshop in Sayulita, Mexico in June as part of Talleres Toltecatl. Land in central Wisconsin that was once home to a murderer whose story inspired a novel by Robert Bloch and the movie Psycho (with Tony Perkins as Norman Bates) was pulled from an online auction at Ebay. Vampire Vow, Michael Schiefelbein’s novel of an ancient Roman officer falling in love with Jesus Christ before becoming a vampire, has been option as a film by Shattering Paradigms Entertainment. The next project from Funny Boy Films, the force behind Adam & Steve and Latter Days, will be an adaptation of Neil Miller’s Sex Crime Panic. The Longtime GLBT newspaper in South Florida, The Weekly News, has shuttered. Congrats to Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the terrific Suspect Thoughts duo, who found a new home in Oakland and will keep the press in San Francisco. Lawrence Schimel’s new collection of short stories, Two Boys in Love, debuts in English after prior publications in Catalan, Spanish, German, and Greek. Carole Spearin McCauley’s 12th novel, A Winning Death, is forthcoming from Hilliard & Harris. Kensington will publish Andrew Beierle’s new novel, First Person Plural, in 2007. Lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate in music at Boston’s Berklee College of Music this month. A suburban New York high school canceled an appearance by noted transgender author and activist Kate Bornstein after complaints from a local businessman. And Rosie O’Donnell could be headed towards The View, replacing Meredith Viera, who replaces Katie Couric on the Today show.
Kudos: Allan Gurganus was awarded a Fiction Fellowship from the John Simon Guggeheim Memorial Foundation. Among the writers receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts were Vestal McIntyre, Andrew Sean Greer, and Patrick Ryan. Authors Krandall Kraus and Richard McCann were awarded fiction fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Sarah Waters new novel, The Night Watch, has been shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Short story author Alice Munro will receive the MacDowell Medal in August for her outstanding contribution to the arts. The short list for Britain’s new National Short Story Prize includes “Men of Ireland,” a story by 77-year old legend William Trevor. The winner recieves £15,000.
Lambda Literary Update: The Lambda Literary awards will be Thursday May 18. The reception will begin at 6:00 pm, ceremonies at 7:00 pm, and a post-reception party at 9:30 p.m. Location is the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters, 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036-3278.
Open calls: Alyson Books is collecting stories for Best Date Ever: True Stories That Celebrate Gay Relationships and its lesbian counterpart. Deadline is July 31, 2006. Stories should be sent to bestdate@alyson.com. Editor Rob Knight is looking for stories for Shifting Again, an anthology about “shape shifters,” and Eternal Darkness, an anthology about vampires, both for Torquere Press. Deadline is June 1, 2006. Stories can be submitted to submissions@torquerepress.com. Author C. Bard Cole has morphed his Six Bricks Press into an online quarterly journal, Six Little Things, each issue with a new theme. Check out the Web site www.sixbrickspress.com for more details. The summer 2006 issue of cyberzine Hand-Tooth-Nail will focus on alternate images, voices and representations of “Queerness and Masculinity.” Check out the Web site, www.handtoothnail.com, for more details. Chroma, the popular British queer literary journal, is launching an international Queer Writing Competition. Categories are Short Story, Poetry, and a TransFabulous Award. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details, visit the Web site www.chromajournal.co.uk. Zeus, a new national gay men’s magazine is looking for freelance writers. Email editor@zeusmagazine.com for more details. And Velvet Mafia is looking for a few good young men. Writers 35 and under will be the focus of the e-zine’s 21st issue. Submissions must be received before October 1st, 2006 at editor@velvetmafia.com.
Royal Rumble: Reuters reported that two sets of parents filed a lawsuit on in April against the town of Lexington, Massachusetts and its public school system after a teacher read King & King, a gay-themed fairy tale, to a classroom of about 20 children, most of whom were 7 years old, without notifying the parents first. The lawsuit also charges that the school broke a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring that parents be notified of sex education lessons. King & King, written by two Dutch women, Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, and published in 2002 by Berkley California publisher Tricycle Press, tells the story of a crown prince who rejects a bevy of beautiful princesses, rebuffing each potential mate until falling in love with a prince. The two marry, sealing the union with a kiss, and live happily ever after. King & King was ranked eighth among the top 10 books people wanted removed from libraries in 2004, according to the American Library Association. Complaints about the 32-page book first surfaced in 2004 in North Carolina. The book has sold about 15,000 copies in the United States. A sequel, King, King and Family, about a royal gay family, was published two years later. Paul Ash, the superintendent of schools for Lexington, said that reading King & King was not intended as sex education but as a way to educate children about the world in which they live, especially in Massachusetts, the only U.S. state in which gay and lesbian couples can legally wed. It was read during a lesson about different types of weddings. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Boston, alleges violations of the federal civil rights of the two sets of parents, David and Tonia Parker and Rob and Robin Wirthlin. It also accuses the town and school officials of violating the Massachusetts civil rights code and the state’s parental notification law, according to the parents’ attorney, Boston law firm Denner Associates. The dispute erupted when Robin Wirthlin complained to the school’s principal after her 7-year-old son told her about the reading last month. She then turned to the conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group Parents Rights Coalition. David Parker has been at odds with the town’s school system since he was arrested a year ago for trespassing when he refused to leave school grounds until authorities promised to excuse his son from classroom discussions on same-sex parents. His son, who at the time was about 5 years old, had brought home a “diversity book bag” that included the book Who’s in a Family? The book includes pictures of same-sex parents along with other types of families.
Passages: Elizabeth Maguire, a publisher of noted wit and passion who in a 25-year career worked with historians, theologians, and other nonfiction authors, died April 8, 2006, of ovarian cancer. She was 47. She is survived by her partner, Karen Wolny. Born in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1958, and raised in Harrison, NY, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard in 1980. Since 2002, Maguire had served as publisher of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus, after previously working at numerous publishers including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Addison Wesley Longman, and the Free Press. A champion of African-American nonfiction, she was also responsible for publishing many gay authors, including historian George Chauncey. She was also the author a novel, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, published by Carroll & Graf in 2002.
Gerard Reve, considered one of the Dutch postwar literary greats, died April 8, 2006. He was 82. Reve, whose full name was Gerard Kornelis van het Reve, published his first novel, De Avonden (The Evenings), in 1947, about a disaffected office worker. Reve’s controversial books Op Weg Naar Het Einde (Approaching the End, 1963) and Nader tot U (Nearer to Thee, 1966) dealt openly with the author’s homosexuality and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Nader tot U sparked controversy because Reve wrote about having sex with God, who appeared to him in the guise of a donkey. He was prosecuted for blasphemy, but cleared in 1968. He published many autobiographical books that were often a mixture of letters and novels. He won top literary honors, including the P. C. Hooft Prize in 1968 and the Prize of Dutch Letters in 2001. His books have been translated into French, German, English and several Eastern European languages. Reve, who had Alzheimer’s disease, spent his final two years in a nursing home in Belgium.
Kudos: Allan Gurganus was awarded a Fiction Fellowship from the John Simon Guggeheim Memorial Foundation. Among the writers receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts were Vestal McIntyre, Andrew Sean Greer, and Patrick Ryan. Authors Krandall Kraus and Richard McCann were awarded fiction fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Sarah Waters new novel, The Night Watch, has been shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Short story author Alice Munro will receive the MacDowell Medal in August for her outstanding contribution to the arts. The short list for Britain’s new National Short Story Prize includes “Men of Ireland,” a story by 77-year old legend William Trevor. The winner recieves £15,000.
Lambda Literary Update: The Lambda Literary awards will be Thursday May 18. The reception will begin at 6:00 pm, ceremonies at 7:00 pm, and a post-reception party at 9:30 p.m. Location is the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters, 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036-3278.
Open calls: Alyson Books is collecting stories for Best Date Ever: True Stories That Celebrate Gay Relationships and its lesbian counterpart. Deadline is July 31, 2006. Stories should be sent to bestdate@alyson.com. Editor Rob Knight is looking for stories for Shifting Again, an anthology about “shape shifters,” and Eternal Darkness, an anthology about vampires, both for Torquere Press. Deadline is June 1, 2006. Stories can be submitted to submissions@torquerepress.com. Author C. Bard Cole has morphed his Six Bricks Press into an online quarterly journal, Six Little Things, each issue with a new theme. Check out the Web site www.sixbrickspress.com for more details. The summer 2006 issue of cyberzine Hand-Tooth-Nail will focus on alternate images, voices and representations of “Queerness and Masculinity.” Check out the Web site, www.handtoothnail.com, for more details. Chroma, the popular British queer literary journal, is launching an international Queer Writing Competition. Categories are Short Story, Poetry, and a TransFabulous Award. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details, visit the Web site www.chromajournal.co.uk. Zeus, a new national gay men’s magazine is looking for freelance writers. Email editor@zeusmagazine.com for more details. And Velvet Mafia is looking for a few good young men. Writers 35 and under will be the focus of the e-zine’s 21st issue. Submissions must be received before October 1st, 2006 at editor@velvetmafia.com.
Royal Rumble: Reuters reported that two sets of parents filed a lawsuit on in April against the town of Lexington, Massachusetts and its public school system after a teacher read King & King, a gay-themed fairy tale, to a classroom of about 20 children, most of whom were 7 years old, without notifying the parents first. The lawsuit also charges that the school broke a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring that parents be notified of sex education lessons. King & King, written by two Dutch women, Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, and published in 2002 by Berkley California publisher Tricycle Press, tells the story of a crown prince who rejects a bevy of beautiful princesses, rebuffing each potential mate until falling in love with a prince. The two marry, sealing the union with a kiss, and live happily ever after. King & King was ranked eighth among the top 10 books people wanted removed from libraries in 2004, according to the American Library Association. Complaints about the 32-page book first surfaced in 2004 in North Carolina. The book has sold about 15,000 copies in the United States. A sequel, King, King and Family, about a royal gay family, was published two years later. Paul Ash, the superintendent of schools for Lexington, said that reading King & King was not intended as sex education but as a way to educate children about the world in which they live, especially in Massachusetts, the only U.S. state in which gay and lesbian couples can legally wed. It was read during a lesson about different types of weddings. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Boston, alleges violations of the federal civil rights of the two sets of parents, David and Tonia Parker and Rob and Robin Wirthlin. It also accuses the town and school officials of violating the Massachusetts civil rights code and the state’s parental notification law, according to the parents’ attorney, Boston law firm Denner Associates. The dispute erupted when Robin Wirthlin complained to the school’s principal after her 7-year-old son told her about the reading last month. She then turned to the conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group Parents Rights Coalition. David Parker has been at odds with the town’s school system since he was arrested a year ago for trespassing when he refused to leave school grounds until authorities promised to excuse his son from classroom discussions on same-sex parents. His son, who at the time was about 5 years old, had brought home a “diversity book bag” that included the book Who’s in a Family? The book includes pictures of same-sex parents along with other types of families.
Passages: Elizabeth Maguire, a publisher of noted wit and passion who in a 25-year career worked with historians, theologians, and other nonfiction authors, died April 8, 2006, of ovarian cancer. She was 47. She is survived by her partner, Karen Wolny. Born in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1958, and raised in Harrison, NY, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard in 1980. Since 2002, Maguire had served as publisher of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus, after previously working at numerous publishers including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Addison Wesley Longman, and the Free Press. A champion of African-American nonfiction, she was also responsible for publishing many gay authors, including historian George Chauncey. She was also the author a novel, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, published by Carroll & Graf in 2002.
Gerard Reve, considered one of the Dutch postwar literary greats, died April 8, 2006. He was 82. Reve, whose full name was Gerard Kornelis van het Reve, published his first novel, De Avonden (The Evenings), in 1947, about a disaffected office worker. Reve’s controversial books Op Weg Naar Het Einde (Approaching the End, 1963) and Nader tot U (Nearer to Thee, 1966) dealt openly with the author’s homosexuality and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Nader tot U sparked controversy because Reve wrote about having sex with God, who appeared to him in the guise of a donkey. He was prosecuted for blasphemy, but cleared in 1968. He published many autobiographical books that were often a mixture of letters and novels. He won top literary honors, including the P. C. Hooft Prize in 1968 and the Prize of Dutch Letters in 2001. His books have been translated into French, German, English and several Eastern European languages. Reve, who had Alzheimer’s disease, spent his final two years in a nursing home in Belgium.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
April Publishing Notes
The buzz: Michael Connor is the new editor of Insightout Book club. Judy Weider has stepped down as the editorial director of LPI Media Inc, parent company of The Advocate. Lloyd Fan as stepped in as CEO of Triangle Multi-Media Limited and Q Television Network, taking over from founder Frank Olsen. Harper’s magazine is drawing the wrath of AIDS researchers and activists for an article by Celia Farber in its March 2006 issue that gives credence to the theories that HIV does not cause AIDS. After surviving Katrina, writer Jamie Joy Gatto and her boyfriend Ben are getting married later this year. Edwin Blair auctioned first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts, and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski and raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit his friend and fellow Big Easy residents Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband Jon, who published some of Bukowski’s early works. The New York Public Library purchased the 11,000-page personal archive of author William S. Burroughs for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, which also houses Jack Kerouac’s literary and personal archive. Patricia Highsmith is the subject of a multimedia exhibition at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Suspect Thoughts Press, the “archipelago of misfit books,” is in the process of launching several new imprints, including She Devil Press and a future children’s imprint, Suspect Tots. Some Men, playwright Terrence McNally’s new musically tinged comedy-drama about the current state of gay America, begins previews in Philadelphia May 12, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. Plans are afoot to bring the 1980 disco film Xanadu to Broadway as a stage musical in spring 2007. Playwright Douglas Carter Beane is putting together the libretto, and the musical will use the John Farrar–Jeff Lynne songs from the movie. Director Christopher Ashley hopes to have an out-of-town tryout up and running this fall. A Very Serious Person, co-written and directed by playwright and performer Charles Busch, will premiere at the fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival in April. The film is about a young boy obsessed with show tunes and vintage Hollywood. Producing duo Neil Meron and Craig Zeron are eying a film version of Going All the Way about baseball player Billy Bean. The Weinstein Company has optioned the movie rights to several stories by New York Times reporter Warren St. John on his revelations of JT Leroy literary hoax.
Brokeback Backlash: Yes, it failed to get Best Picture Oscar trophy. While author Annie Proulx wrote of her disappointment in The Guardian and fans chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page thank you ad in Daily Variety, actor Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit saying that he was the victim of a “movie-laundering” scheme by the studio division behind the movie. The night before the Oscar loss, the film was named Best Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards. The movie also receieved top honors at the recent GLAAD Media Awards.
Kudos: On the long list for Britain’s Orange Prize is Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Night Watch. Lorrie Moore, who has written a few terrific gay-themed short stories in her career, was elected to membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alan Bennett won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. Geoff Ryman’s novel Air: Or, Have Not Have won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors science fiction and fantasy works that explore and expand gender roles. Ryman is the author of numerous award-winning books, including 253, or Tube Theatre.
Open calls: Author Greg Herren is editing an anthology of queer themed science fiction titled Distant Horizons, to be published by Positronic Press in the summer of 2007. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006. No electronic submissions will be accepted. A printed copy of the short story should be sent to: 5500 Prytania Street #215, New Orleans, LA 70115. For more details, query Greg at gregh121@aol.com. Editor Michael Luongo is looking for submissions of gay travel erotica for Between the Palms II. E-mail mtluongo@hotmail.com for more details. Deadline is May 30, 2006. The deadline for the annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the best GLBT single poem in any style or length is June 27, 2006. Poems should be submitted with a separate cover sheet with name, address, telephone, and email address. Judging is done anonymously. The award carries a $100.00 prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. For complete guidelines and details, e-mail givalpress@yahoo.com or visit: www.givalpress.com. The winner is usually announced on or before September 1, 2006. And a new online literary journal, Wild About Oscar, is looking for submissions. E-mail editor@wildaboutoscar.com for more details.
In Memoriam: Warner, Seven Stories, Beacon Press, The Carl Brandon Society, Writers House, and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame have jointly created the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor the science fiction writer who died in February. The fund will “enable writers of colors to attend on of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. ” It has been established to honor and affirm her legacy by providing the same opportunity and experience Ms. Butler had to guture generations of emerging writers of color. The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will be awarded in 2007. More details of the application process will be announced later this year at CarlBrandon.org.
Books for Katrina Victims: The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles to designate for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. If you would like to contribute, please send your books to: Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112. If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate. For more information, visit http://nutrias.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp .
Passages: Nick Hornack, also know as the gay author Alexander Renault, died in February, 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 38 years old. Writing and editing as Alexander Renault, Hornack published work in a variety of genres from pet magazines to feminist works, and had short stories and interviews featured on a number of Web sites, including Mind Caviar, Ophelia’s Muse, Scarlet Letters, and Velvet Mafia. He was also the editor of the anthology Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of their Mothers, which he published as a print-on-demand book after it was turned down by several publishing houses. He had a long career in the mental health field and lived in rural Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs.
Brokeback Backlash: Yes, it failed to get Best Picture Oscar trophy. While author Annie Proulx wrote of her disappointment in The Guardian and fans chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page thank you ad in Daily Variety, actor Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit saying that he was the victim of a “movie-laundering” scheme by the studio division behind the movie. The night before the Oscar loss, the film was named Best Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards. The movie also receieved top honors at the recent GLAAD Media Awards.
Kudos: On the long list for Britain’s Orange Prize is Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Night Watch. Lorrie Moore, who has written a few terrific gay-themed short stories in her career, was elected to membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alan Bennett won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. Geoff Ryman’s novel Air: Or, Have Not Have won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors science fiction and fantasy works that explore and expand gender roles. Ryman is the author of numerous award-winning books, including 253, or Tube Theatre.
Open calls: Author Greg Herren is editing an anthology of queer themed science fiction titled Distant Horizons, to be published by Positronic Press in the summer of 2007. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006. No electronic submissions will be accepted. A printed copy of the short story should be sent to: 5500 Prytania Street #215, New Orleans, LA 70115. For more details, query Greg at gregh121@aol.com. Editor Michael Luongo is looking for submissions of gay travel erotica for Between the Palms II. E-mail mtluongo@hotmail.com for more details. Deadline is May 30, 2006. The deadline for the annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the best GLBT single poem in any style or length is June 27, 2006. Poems should be submitted with a separate cover sheet with name, address, telephone, and email address. Judging is done anonymously. The award carries a $100.00 prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. For complete guidelines and details, e-mail givalpress@yahoo.com or visit: www.givalpress.com. The winner is usually announced on or before September 1, 2006. And a new online literary journal, Wild About Oscar, is looking for submissions. E-mail editor@wildaboutoscar.com for more details.
In Memoriam: Warner, Seven Stories, Beacon Press, The Carl Brandon Society, Writers House, and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame have jointly created the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor the science fiction writer who died in February. The fund will “enable writers of colors to attend on of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. ” It has been established to honor and affirm her legacy by providing the same opportunity and experience Ms. Butler had to guture generations of emerging writers of color. The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will be awarded in 2007. More details of the application process will be announced later this year at CarlBrandon.org.
Books for Katrina Victims: The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles to designate for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. If you would like to contribute, please send your books to: Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112. If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate. For more information, visit http://nutrias.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp .
Passages: Nick Hornack, also know as the gay author Alexander Renault, died in February, 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 38 years old. Writing and editing as Alexander Renault, Hornack published work in a variety of genres from pet magazines to feminist works, and had short stories and interviews featured on a number of Web sites, including Mind Caviar, Ophelia’s Muse, Scarlet Letters, and Velvet Mafia. He was also the editor of the anthology Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of their Mothers, which he published as a print-on-demand book after it was turned down by several publishing houses. He had a long career in the mental health field and lived in rural Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
And The Nominees Are
Twenty-one books are finalists for the seven categories of awards given by the Publishing Triangle. Here’s the list of nominees:
A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Branwell by Douglas A. Martin (Soft Skull Press) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Brian in Three Seasons by Patricia Grossman (Permanent Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Collected Poems with Notes Toward the Memoirs by Djuna Barnes, edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson Books) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale University Press) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Cut Off the Ears of Winter by Peter Covino (New Issues) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Directed by Desire by June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Gotta Find Me an Angel by Brenda Brooks (Raincoast Books) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Loose End by Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
My One-Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
On the Ice by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Star Dust by Frank Bidart (Farrar Straus Giroux) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Still Life With June by Darren Greer (Cormorant Books) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Basic Books) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Wild Girls by Diana Souhami (St. Martin’s Press) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (University of Minnesota Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Ninety-eight books were nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards: Here’s a list of the nominees:
Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Antonio's Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Children’s Book Press) Children's/Young Adult
Artist’s Dream by Gerri Hill (Bella Books) Romance
Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) Lesbian Fiction
Best Gay Erotica 2006, ed. by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Richard Labonte (Cleis) Erotica
Best Lesbian Erotica 2006, ed. by Eileen Myles and Tristan Taormino (Cleis) Erotica
Beyond Recall by Mary Meigs and Lise Weil (Talonbooks) Biography
Beyond the Down Low by Keith Boykin (Carroll & Graf) Nonfiction
Bilal's Bread by Sulyman X (Alyson) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Bliss by Fiona Zedde (Kensington) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Blue on Blue Ground by Aaron Smith (Pittsburgh) Gay Men's Poetry
Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, ed. Emanuel Xavier (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Cajun Snuff by W. Randy Haynes (Publish America) Gay Men's Mystery
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Close Contact by Sean Wolfe (Kensington) Erotica
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale) Gay Men's Poetry
Darkness Descending by Penny Mickelbury (Kings Crossing) Lesbian Mystery
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar De Alba (Arte Publico) Lesbian Mystery
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon) Lesbian Poetry
Distant Shores, Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Romance
Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday) Humor
Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men, ed. Wendell Ricketts (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Eye of Water by Amber Flora Thomas (Pittsburgh) Lesbian Poetry
Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (Random House) Gay Men's Fiction
February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin) Biography
Five Books of Moses Lapinsky by Karen Tulchinsky (Raincoast Books) Lesbian Fiction
Fledgling by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Lui (Southern Illinois) Gay Men's Poetry
Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men’s Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf) Anthology
Fumbling Toward Divinity by Craig Hickman (Annabessacook Farm) Spirituality
German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene (Wisconsin) Gay Men's Fiction
Gore Vidal’s America by Dennis Altman (Polity Press) Nonfiction
I Am This One Walking Beside Me by Daniel Gebhardt (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
In Too Deep by Ronica Black (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Invasion of Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, (Alyson Books) Humor
Juicy Mother by Jennifer Camper (Soft Skull Press) Humor
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Just Like That by Karin Kallmaker (Bella Books) Romance
Justice Served by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Mystery
Lesbian Communities Festivals, Rvs And the Internet, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Penny Sablove (Harrington Park Press) LGBT Studies
Lesbian Pulp Fiction, ed. Katherine Forrest (Cleis) Anthology
Life Mask by Jackie Kay (Bloodaxe Books) Lesbian Poetry
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt) Lesbian Fiction
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West by Ruth Vanita (Palgrave Macmillan) LGBT Studies
Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree (Soft Skull Press) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann (Pantheon) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
My One Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) Belles Lettres
New and Selected Poems, Volume II by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) Lesbian Poetry
No Sister of Mine by Jeanne G’Fellers (Bella Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger (The Disinformation Company) Biography
One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Mystery
Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (Counterpoint Press) Belles Lettres
Rainbow Road by Alex Sanchez (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Raising Boys without Men by Peggy Drexler (Rodale) Nonfiction
Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, & Sluts, ed. Anna Camilleri (Arsenal Pulp Press) Anthology
Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck (5 Spot, Warner Books) Humor
Rode Hard But Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica edited by Sacchi Green & Rakelle Valencia (Suspect Thoughts) Erotica
School of the Arts by Mark Doty (HarperCollins) Gay Men's Poetry
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (Wisconsin) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Shapers of Darkness by David B. Coe (Tor) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Erotica
Sugar by Martin Pousson (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Poetry
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books) Children's/Young Adult
Tab Hunter Confidential by Tab Hunter, with Eddie Muller (Algonquin) Belles Lettres
Temple Landfall by Jane Fletcher (Bold Strokes) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Actor’s Guide to Greed by Rick Copp (Kensington) Gay Men's Mystery
The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts) Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (Henry Holt) Biography
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
The Iron Girl by Ellen Hart (St. Martins Minotaur) Lesbian Mystery
The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey (GLB Publishers) Gay Men's Mystery
The Price of Temptation by M. J. Pearson (Seventh Window) Romance
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon) Transgender/GenderQueer
The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (Spinifex) Spirituality
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) Belles Lettres
Totally Joe by James Howe (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Walt Loves the Bearcat by Randy Boyd (West Beach Books) Romance
What the L ? by Kate Clinton (Carroll & Graf) Humor
What We Do is Secret by Kief Hillsbery (Villard) Gay Men's Fiction
When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman (Columbia) LGBT Studies
When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg, illustrated by Tom Bachtell (Regan Books) Belles Lettres
Where the Apple Falls by Samiya Bashir (redbone press) Lesbian Poetry
White Tiger by Michael Allen Dymmoch (St. Martins Minotaur) Gay Men's Mystery
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch by Dwight A. McBride (NYU Press) LGBT Studies
Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrys (W. W. Norton) Lesbian Fiction
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, & Art by Diana Souhami (St. Martins) Biography
With or Without You by Lauren Sanders (Akashic) Lesbian Fiction
Women of Mystery edited by Katherine Forrest (Haworth) Lesbian Mystery
Women Together/Women Apart by Tirza True Latimer (Rutgers) Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota) Nonfiction
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Zest for Life: Lesbians’ Experience of Menopause by Jennifer Kelly (Spinifex) LGBT Studies
A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Branwell by Douglas A. Martin (Soft Skull Press) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Brian in Three Seasons by Patricia Grossman (Permanent Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Collected Poems with Notes Toward the Memoirs by Djuna Barnes, edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson Books) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale University Press) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Cut Off the Ears of Winter by Peter Covino (New Issues) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Directed by Desire by June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Gotta Find Me an Angel by Brenda Brooks (Raincoast Books) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Loose End by Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
My One-Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
On the Ice by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Star Dust by Frank Bidart (Farrar Straus Giroux) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Still Life With June by Darren Greer (Cormorant Books) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Basic Books) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Wild Girls by Diana Souhami (St. Martin’s Press) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (University of Minnesota Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Ninety-eight books were nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards: Here’s a list of the nominees:
Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Antonio's Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Children’s Book Press) Children's/Young Adult
Artist’s Dream by Gerri Hill (Bella Books) Romance
Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) Lesbian Fiction
Best Gay Erotica 2006, ed. by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Richard Labonte (Cleis) Erotica
Best Lesbian Erotica 2006, ed. by Eileen Myles and Tristan Taormino (Cleis) Erotica
Beyond Recall by Mary Meigs and Lise Weil (Talonbooks) Biography
Beyond the Down Low by Keith Boykin (Carroll & Graf) Nonfiction
Bilal's Bread by Sulyman X (Alyson) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Bliss by Fiona Zedde (Kensington) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Blue on Blue Ground by Aaron Smith (Pittsburgh) Gay Men's Poetry
Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, ed. Emanuel Xavier (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Cajun Snuff by W. Randy Haynes (Publish America) Gay Men's Mystery
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Close Contact by Sean Wolfe (Kensington) Erotica
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale) Gay Men's Poetry
Darkness Descending by Penny Mickelbury (Kings Crossing) Lesbian Mystery
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar De Alba (Arte Publico) Lesbian Mystery
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon) Lesbian Poetry
Distant Shores, Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Romance
Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday) Humor
Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men, ed. Wendell Ricketts (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Eye of Water by Amber Flora Thomas (Pittsburgh) Lesbian Poetry
Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (Random House) Gay Men's Fiction
February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin) Biography
Five Books of Moses Lapinsky by Karen Tulchinsky (Raincoast Books) Lesbian Fiction
Fledgling by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Lui (Southern Illinois) Gay Men's Poetry
Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men’s Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf) Anthology
Fumbling Toward Divinity by Craig Hickman (Annabessacook Farm) Spirituality
German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene (Wisconsin) Gay Men's Fiction
Gore Vidal’s America by Dennis Altman (Polity Press) Nonfiction
I Am This One Walking Beside Me by Daniel Gebhardt (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
In Too Deep by Ronica Black (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Invasion of Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, (Alyson Books) Humor
Juicy Mother by Jennifer Camper (Soft Skull Press) Humor
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Just Like That by Karin Kallmaker (Bella Books) Romance
Justice Served by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Mystery
Lesbian Communities Festivals, Rvs And the Internet, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Penny Sablove (Harrington Park Press) LGBT Studies
Lesbian Pulp Fiction, ed. Katherine Forrest (Cleis) Anthology
Life Mask by Jackie Kay (Bloodaxe Books) Lesbian Poetry
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt) Lesbian Fiction
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West by Ruth Vanita (Palgrave Macmillan) LGBT Studies
Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree (Soft Skull Press) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann (Pantheon) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
My One Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) Belles Lettres
New and Selected Poems, Volume II by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) Lesbian Poetry
No Sister of Mine by Jeanne G’Fellers (Bella Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger (The Disinformation Company) Biography
One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Mystery
Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (Counterpoint Press) Belles Lettres
Rainbow Road by Alex Sanchez (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Raising Boys without Men by Peggy Drexler (Rodale) Nonfiction
Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, & Sluts, ed. Anna Camilleri (Arsenal Pulp Press) Anthology
Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck (5 Spot, Warner Books) Humor
Rode Hard But Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica edited by Sacchi Green & Rakelle Valencia (Suspect Thoughts) Erotica
School of the Arts by Mark Doty (HarperCollins) Gay Men's Poetry
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (Wisconsin) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Shapers of Darkness by David B. Coe (Tor) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Erotica
Sugar by Martin Pousson (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Poetry
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books) Children's/Young Adult
Tab Hunter Confidential by Tab Hunter, with Eddie Muller (Algonquin) Belles Lettres
Temple Landfall by Jane Fletcher (Bold Strokes) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Actor’s Guide to Greed by Rick Copp (Kensington) Gay Men's Mystery
The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts) Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (Henry Holt) Biography
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
The Iron Girl by Ellen Hart (St. Martins Minotaur) Lesbian Mystery
The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey (GLB Publishers) Gay Men's Mystery
The Price of Temptation by M. J. Pearson (Seventh Window) Romance
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon) Transgender/GenderQueer
The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (Spinifex) Spirituality
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) Belles Lettres
Totally Joe by James Howe (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Walt Loves the Bearcat by Randy Boyd (West Beach Books) Romance
What the L ? by Kate Clinton (Carroll & Graf) Humor
What We Do is Secret by Kief Hillsbery (Villard) Gay Men's Fiction
When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman (Columbia) LGBT Studies
When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg, illustrated by Tom Bachtell (Regan Books) Belles Lettres
Where the Apple Falls by Samiya Bashir (redbone press) Lesbian Poetry
White Tiger by Michael Allen Dymmoch (St. Martins Minotaur) Gay Men's Mystery
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch by Dwight A. McBride (NYU Press) LGBT Studies
Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrys (W. W. Norton) Lesbian Fiction
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, & Art by Diana Souhami (St. Martins) Biography
With or Without You by Lauren Sanders (Akashic) Lesbian Fiction
Women of Mystery edited by Katherine Forrest (Haworth) Lesbian Mystery
Women Together/Women Apart by Tirza True Latimer (Rutgers) Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota) Nonfiction
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Zest for Life: Lesbians’ Experience of Menopause by Jennifer Kelly (Spinifex) LGBT Studies
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
March Publishing Notes
The buzz: Andrew Lang will produce a film adaptation of Peter Lefcourt’s 1992 gay-themed baseball novel The Dreyfus Affair. Stone Village Pictures has optioned the film rights to A.M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life. Rock singer Marilyn Manson plans to play author Lewis Carroll in his self-penned “arthouse horror” film Phantasmagoria — The Visions of Lewis Carroll. The two shirts worn by the stars of Brokeback Mountain garnered a record $101,100.51 for Variety, the Children’s Charity of Southern California, in a recent eBay auction. Gay philanthropist and Hollywood memorabilia collector Tom Gregory placed the winning bid. The Broadway opening of Lestat, the Elton John musical based on the Anne Rice vampire-themed novels, has been moved to March 25. In July 2006, a new translation of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner will be presented by at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Public Theater’s summer season. Directed by George C. Wolfe it will feature Meryl Streep. Author and former Out Traveler editor Matt Link is launching a new travel magazine in conjunction with the Sherman’s Travel organization. After 10 years at the helm of Philadelphia Gay News, editor Patti Tihey says goodbye to the weekly newspaper. Window Media President William Waybourn has stepped down as president of the newspaper chain. Peter Polimino will be the new President. Author Greg Herren has started a regular column on writing for Erotica Readers & Writers Association website. Greg was also recently mentioned on the floor of the Virginia state legislature in an attempt by state Republicans to ban GSA alliances in high schools. Despite the controversy over the unmasking of author J.T. LeRoy, San Francisco publisher Last Gasp is moving ahead with their next LeRoy work, Labour, a novella illustrated by Australian artist Cherry Hood. Scribner and Pocket Books will publish Blind Fall, the upcoming novel from Christopher Rice, in early 2008. The new book deals with an Iraq veteran searching for redemption following the brutal murder of a comrade he betrayed. Rose MacMurray’s The Distant Strains of Thunder, a coming of age novel about a girl’s friendship with Emily Dickinson, will be published by Little, Brown. Courtney Love’s Dirty Blonde, journals and photos, is forthcoming from Farrar Straus & Giroux. Editors Christopher Anderson and Alecia Oleyourryk’s are on board for Boink: The Book, forthcoming from Warner books. Based on the controversial college magazine, a sex-positive, lifestyle publication, Boink: The Book will feature edgy narratives, prescriptive advice, provocative photos, and confessions from real college students. After 6 volumes of daily gay romance comic strips, Young Bottoms in Love, created by Tim Fish in August 2002, is coming to an end at the PopImage website. Howard Cruse, the renowned underground comix artist, drew the final webisode which debuted in February.
New Owner for Favorite Haunt: Kim Brinster, manager of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop for ten years, is now the owner of the bookstore. Brinster purchased the landmark Greenwich Village Bookshop at 15 Christopher Street on February 1, 2006 from Lambda Rising Bookstores. “It’s a thrill,” Brinster told Bookselling This Week. “I worked really hard to bring the store to where it is today, and I’m happy to know it’s mine. It’s played an historic role [in gay and lesbian history], and it’s so special to so many people.” “This is an exciting time for New York’s favorite and oldest gay bookstore,” said Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s owner, in a statement. “Three years ago, Oscar Wilde was in imminent danger of closing forever when, at literally the last hour, Lambda Rising stepped in to rescue the historic bookstore. In the time since, Lambda Rising, working closely with Kim Brinster and the New York store’s staff, has brought the store back from the brink and restored financially sound operations.” The Oscar Wilde Bookshop has been in continuous operation in Greenwich Village since 1967.
The Place to Be: The fourth annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival is moving forward as scheduled. The dates are May 12-14, 2006 in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2006 speakers and presenters include Achy Obejas, Martin Pousson, Karl Soehnlein, Radclyffe, Emanuel Xavier, and many others. This year there will be sessions led by Michelle Tea, Steven Saylor, and Greg Herren. For more information, visit www.sasfest.com. Pink Ink, the Publishing Triangle’s queer book festival in New York City, returns June 9-11, 2006. A reading series and twelve workhops and panels are being planned. Visit www.publishingtriangle.org for more details and updates.
Kudos: Alan Bennett has been nominated as Author of the Year in the British Book Awards. Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part is a nonfiction nominee for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award. Authors Greg Wharton and Simon Sheppard were short-listed for the Rauxa prize for best erotic short story. Karla Jay received the Distinguished Faculty Award at the Tenth Annual Dyson Distinguished Achievement Awards, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University. Ellen DeGeneres and her daytime talk show were nominated for 11 daytime Emmys. Brokeback Mountain was named Queer Favorite Feature Film on the recent voting on The Derek and Romaine Show heard on Sirius OutQ. At the British Academy awards (BAFTAs), Brokeback Mountain was honored for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. Ang Lee won Best Director honors and Jake Gyllenhaal was named Best Supporting Actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman won for Best Actor for Capote. Brokeback Mountain was also cited for Best Adapted Screenplat by the Writers Guild of America.
Open calls: Eric Summers is editing an anthology of erotica based on original superheros for STARbooks Press. Deadline is December 31, 2006. For guidelines and submissions, visit the Starbooks Press Web site or e-mail Eric at eric@starbookspress.com. Nominations for the 2006 Rauxa Prize Award are due by August 15, 2006. Given annually to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality, the award carries a prize of $1000. Visit the Web site for more details. This year an additional prize for erotic poetry will be awarded and carries a $300 prize.
Play it Again, Ben: Gay composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote the music for a 1937 English broadcast that included the W. H. Auden poem “Roman Wall Blues,” about a disillusioned soldier on guard duty in the northern extremes of the ancient empire. The recently uncovered score is set to be displayed in England at the Aldeburgh Festival in June and perhaps performed next year at the Sage Gateshead concert hall, near Newcastle, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the broadcast and the centenary of the birth of Auden, The Guardian of London reported. The search for the score was initiated by John Mapplebeck, a filmmaker whose company plans a project about the broadcast. Fifteen years after his newspaper appeal for information proved fruitless, Mapplebeck happened to mention his search to Philip Pendrel-Smith, a retired banker whom he drives to evensong every Sunday. Pendrel-Smith, once an actor, was involved in the original broadcast and picked up and kept the music after the airing. The score has been sent to the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. “It’s a treasure,” said the librarian, Chris Grogan.
Passages: Octavia Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence in the United States as a science fiction writer, died February 25, 2006. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home. The lesbian writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could take only a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park. Butler began writing at age 10, embracing science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl From Mars and thinking she could write a better story. In 1970 she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich. Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the U.S. South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was published last fall. In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.
New Owner for Favorite Haunt: Kim Brinster, manager of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop for ten years, is now the owner of the bookstore. Brinster purchased the landmark Greenwich Village Bookshop at 15 Christopher Street on February 1, 2006 from Lambda Rising Bookstores. “It’s a thrill,” Brinster told Bookselling This Week. “I worked really hard to bring the store to where it is today, and I’m happy to know it’s mine. It’s played an historic role [in gay and lesbian history], and it’s so special to so many people.” “This is an exciting time for New York’s favorite and oldest gay bookstore,” said Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s owner, in a statement. “Three years ago, Oscar Wilde was in imminent danger of closing forever when, at literally the last hour, Lambda Rising stepped in to rescue the historic bookstore. In the time since, Lambda Rising, working closely with Kim Brinster and the New York store’s staff, has brought the store back from the brink and restored financially sound operations.” The Oscar Wilde Bookshop has been in continuous operation in Greenwich Village since 1967.
The Place to Be: The fourth annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival is moving forward as scheduled. The dates are May 12-14, 2006 in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2006 speakers and presenters include Achy Obejas, Martin Pousson, Karl Soehnlein, Radclyffe, Emanuel Xavier, and many others. This year there will be sessions led by Michelle Tea, Steven Saylor, and Greg Herren. For more information, visit www.sasfest.com. Pink Ink, the Publishing Triangle’s queer book festival in New York City, returns June 9-11, 2006. A reading series and twelve workhops and panels are being planned. Visit www.publishingtriangle.org for more details and updates.
Kudos: Alan Bennett has been nominated as Author of the Year in the British Book Awards. Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part is a nonfiction nominee for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award. Authors Greg Wharton and Simon Sheppard were short-listed for the Rauxa prize for best erotic short story. Karla Jay received the Distinguished Faculty Award at the Tenth Annual Dyson Distinguished Achievement Awards, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University. Ellen DeGeneres and her daytime talk show were nominated for 11 daytime Emmys. Brokeback Mountain was named Queer Favorite Feature Film on the recent voting on The Derek and Romaine Show heard on Sirius OutQ. At the British Academy awards (BAFTAs), Brokeback Mountain was honored for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. Ang Lee won Best Director honors and Jake Gyllenhaal was named Best Supporting Actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman won for Best Actor for Capote. Brokeback Mountain was also cited for Best Adapted Screenplat by the Writers Guild of America.
Open calls: Eric Summers is editing an anthology of erotica based on original superheros for STARbooks Press. Deadline is December 31, 2006. For guidelines and submissions, visit the Starbooks Press Web site or e-mail Eric at eric@starbookspress.com. Nominations for the 2006 Rauxa Prize Award are due by August 15, 2006. Given annually to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality, the award carries a prize of $1000. Visit the Web site for more details. This year an additional prize for erotic poetry will be awarded and carries a $300 prize.
Play it Again, Ben: Gay composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote the music for a 1937 English broadcast that included the W. H. Auden poem “Roman Wall Blues,” about a disillusioned soldier on guard duty in the northern extremes of the ancient empire. The recently uncovered score is set to be displayed in England at the Aldeburgh Festival in June and perhaps performed next year at the Sage Gateshead concert hall, near Newcastle, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the broadcast and the centenary of the birth of Auden, The Guardian of London reported. The search for the score was initiated by John Mapplebeck, a filmmaker whose company plans a project about the broadcast. Fifteen years after his newspaper appeal for information proved fruitless, Mapplebeck happened to mention his search to Philip Pendrel-Smith, a retired banker whom he drives to evensong every Sunday. Pendrel-Smith, once an actor, was involved in the original broadcast and picked up and kept the music after the airing. The score has been sent to the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. “It’s a treasure,” said the librarian, Chris Grogan.
Passages: Octavia Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence in the United States as a science fiction writer, died February 25, 2006. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home. The lesbian writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could take only a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park. Butler began writing at age 10, embracing science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl From Mars and thinking she could write a better story. In 1970 she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich. Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the U.S. South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was published last fall. In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
February Publishing Notes
The buzz: Performer and writer Sandra Bernhard has signed a deal with Q Television to co-host 40 episodes of the Queer Edge With Jack E. Jett talk show. The network is also negotiating with Bernhard to develop her own series. Rosie O’Donnell is partnerning with novelist Alice Hoffman to write a sitcom pilot about an Erma Bombeck-like humorist. Director Philip Kaufman will film a movie about bisexual director Nicholas Ray titled I Was Interrupted. David Fincher will direct Torso, a thriller based on the graphic novel by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko. Miramax Films acquired the distribution rights to The Night Listener, the film adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s novel starring Robin Williams. The film rights to Tom House’s debut novel, The Beginning of Calamities have been optioned. Excerpts of his new novel Career Day, are forthcoming in Antioch Review and Ninth Letter. Hollywood director Roland Emmerich has pledged $150,000 to help support gay and lesbian film preservation through Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the largest gift in the organization’s 24 year history. Fourth Estate will publish Christopher Ross’s Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, in the fall of 2006. Author Stephen Greco is serializing his novel Dreadnought, about a fictional American corporation, through Amazon.com. The six interrelated stories parts are available through Amazon Shorts. Greco is also Executive Director of the Ferro-Grumley Awards, which will be presented at the 17th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, Thursday, May 11, in New York City. Pink Ink, the Triangle’s gay book expo, is scheduled for June 9-11 in New York City.
Lambda Literary Update: Teresa DeCrescenzo has joined the Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation. So far, the Foundation has raised almost $15,000 since December 1, 2005. The Lambda Literary Awards this year will be in May in Washington, D.C., and again in conjunction with Book Expo. The Lambda Book Report will return as a quarterly publication this spring, providing reviews of LGBT books, as well as interviews, features, and lists of resources for the LGBT literary community.
Kudos: The American Library Association has announced the 2006 Stonewall Book Awards. The Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature went to Abha Dawesar, for Babyji, a coming-of-age tale about a free-spirited lesbian teenager in New Delhi. The Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction went to Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the ’70s in San Francisco, a look at the life of disco singer Sylvester James. The awards will be presented at the 2006 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June. Other honorees in the literature category include Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, and The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D’Allesandro, edited by Kevin Killian. In the nonfiction category, honorees include My One-night Stand With Cancer by Tania Katan, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 by Matt Houlbrook, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays by Larry Kramer (Tarcher/Penguin). Gay Scottish writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award for The Accidental. Brokeback Mountain was named picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America. The film also won Best Drama and Best Screenplay from the Golden Globes and Ang Lee was named Best Director by the Directors Guild of America. The film also received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, and nine BAFTA nominations, including Best Film. Brokeback Mountain and Capote were also among GLAAD Media Award nominations for Outstanding Film - Wide Release and for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild. Capote was named the Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics. The movie also won the 18th annual University of Southern California Scripter Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for his performance as the author and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Mysterious Skin, the film adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film - Limited Release.
Open calls: Editor and author Toby Johnson is looking for inspiration fiction, anecdotes, and essays of positive aspects of gay experience and faith for a new anthology to be titled Charmed Lives: Spinning Straw into Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story. The anthology will be published by Lethe Press. Deadline is July 1, 2006. Email tobyjohnso@aol.com for moredetails.
Queer Foundation: The newly-formed Queer Foundation is offering three $1,000 college scholarships to winners of a high school English essay contest. The theme of the 2006 competition is homelessness. The collected essays will help form curriculum materials for use in high schools to benefit LGBTQ students. The awarded scholarships will be for studies in queer theory or a related field at a U.S. college or university. The Queer Foundation is a nonprofit corporation and 501(c)(3) public charity located in Seattle, Washington. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information of an application form, visit http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/queerfoundation/.
Beat Hotel: The spirit of William S. Burroughs lives on in a small hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California, where a month-long 92nd birthday celebration kicks off on February 4th. The Beat Hotel is just a ten-minute drive from Palm Springs and was renovated in 2003 to celebrate the life and work of Burroughs. Each of the eight guestrooms is decorated with photos and artwork by the author, Beat era furniture, and a vintage typewriter. There is also an onsite library featuring various works and first editions of the Beat Generation. Neil Woodburn of the traveler’s weblog, www.Gadling.com, recently posted that the hotel is based upon the original “Beat Hotel” in Paris, at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, where, between 1957-1963 Burroughs, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat artists lived. Burroughs wrote most of Naked Lunch at the Parisian hotel, while Ginsburg penned his famous poem, Kaddish. (The Parisian hotel is now called Relais Hotel du Vieux and still accepts guests.) Burroughs 92nd Birthday Festivities at The Beat Hotel’s InterZone Beat Festival include a Harold Chapman photography exhibition, performances by Husker Du singer/songwriter Grant Hart, slide shows, and various book exhibitions.
A month of literary scandals: So much has been written and discussed elsewhere that I only have to mention a few names for anyone to know what I am referring to: James Frey, JT LeRoy, Nasdijj. A month of literary scandals. Boom! Wham! Pow! And each with some sort of queer connection. Let’s start with LeRoy, or should we say Laura Albert, a 40-year-old middle class white woman from Brooklyn, NY, and Savannah Knoop, a twentysomething wannabe model who hoodwinked an agent, publishers, critics, celebrities, and the book-buying public into believing they were a transgender, HIV-positive writer. And Frey? While every reporter on the beat was ready to shoot down A Million Little Pieces for its embellishments, the word still seems to be out about the gay title character on Frey’s follow-up book, My Friend Leonard. And Nasdijj? The Navajo memoirist turned out to be none other than gay-erotica writer Timothy Patrick Barrus (who is married to a woman and father of a daughter). And the impact of all this fiction in fact is only just beginning to be seen. St. Martin’s Press recently added a sticker to the dedication page of the advance readers’ copies of Augusten Burrough’s latest book, Possible Side Effects: True Stories, to be released in May. It says: “Author’s Note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well.” According to the New York Post gossip column Page Six, St. Martin’s also added disclaimers to Burroughs’s other books, including Running with Scissors and Dry.
Passages: Betty Berzon, pioneer gay rights activist, psychotherapist, and writer, died January 24, 2006. She was 78. She was the founder of Southern California Women for Understanding, as well as co-founder of California Gay Academic Union. She was a founding board chair of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and board member of numerous gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, including the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where she developed a gay and lesbian peer counselor training program; Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation where she created the personal growth program that resulted in the book, Positively Gay (1979); National Gay Rights Advocates, the first public interest law firm to focus on gay rights, and the Community Guild, a groundbreaking effort to assist low-income gay and lesbian seniors. She was also producer of Gaythink, the first national conference to bring together gay and lesbian faculty and students. In 1971, during a UCLA conference called “The Homosexual in America,” Berzon became the first psychotherapist in the country to publicly declare herself as a gay mental health professional. An expert in small group process, Berzon worked with renowned researcher Evelyn Hooker to develop a series of encounter groups for gays and lesbians, called the Quest for Love. Later, she developed a series for Bell and Howell called The Encountertapes, a growth program for leaderless groups, which led to her first edited book, Encounter Groups: First Facts. Berzon practiced psychotherapy with groups and couples for the last twenty-five years of her life, during which time she also wrote four more books, including the best-selling Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships that Last (1988); The Intimacy Dance: A Guide to Long-Term Success in Gay and Lesbian Relationships (1996); Setting Them Straight : You CAN Do Something About Bigotry and Homophobia in Your Life (1996); and Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best autobiography in 2003. Berzon is survived by her partner of thirty-three years, Teresa DeCrescenzo. Also survived by her sister, Dr. Stephanie Miller of Lancaster Ohio; stepmother, Trude Berzon of Des Moines Iowa and North Palm Beach, Florida; stepsister Barbara Kaplan of North Palm Beach, Florida; cousins Sidney, Shirley, Jerry, Sandy, Mary, Dan, and Abbe Wool; and eight nieces and nephews. Teresa DeCrescenzo has requested that donations may be made in Betty’s honor to the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and Lambda Literary Foundation.
Anyda Marchant, a retired attorney, novelist and publisher, died January 11, 2006 at her home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She was 94. Ms. Marchant was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, moving with her family to Washington, DC, at age six. After earning her undergraduate degree and, in 1933, her law degree from what is now George Washington University, she was admitted to practice in DC and Virginia, before the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. She was one of the first female attorneys with the law firm now known as Covington and Burling. She served briefly in private practice and with the U.S. Commerce Dept. before moving to the legal department of the World Bank where she worked for 18 years until her 1972 retirement. In 1972 Marchant and her life partner Muriel Crawford created the Naiad Press with Barbara Grier and Donna McBride. The first novel published by Naiad was Marchant’s The Latecomer, written under the pen name Sarah Aldridge. In 1974, Naiad was formally incorporated, proceeding to publish eleven Sarah Aldridge novels, as well as a wide selection of other feminist and lesbian writers, including Jane Rule, Isabel Miller, Ann Bannon, and Sarah Schulman, among many others. Marchant served as Naiad’s president from its inception until the mid 1990’s. In 1995 Marchant and Crawford founded their own publishing company, A&M Books of Rehoboth Beach. A&M published the last three Sarah Aldridge novels (the latest in 2003), along with the book As I Lay Frying - a Rehoboth Beach Memoir by author Fay Jacobs. Passionate about supporting feminist writers, Marchant continued her publishing and mentoring activities until very recently, highlighted by the October 2005 release of the novel Celebrating Hotchclaw by feminist literary icon Ann Allen Shockley. Marchant is survived by Crawford, her partner of 57 years, as well as a large circle of loving friends. A Donations may be made in Marchant’s name to CAMP Rehoboth, Compassionate Care Hospice, or All Saints Episcopal Church Building Fund (all located within Rehoboth Beach, Delaware).
Tory Dent, an award-winning poet who was diagnosed with HIV at age 30, later developed AIDS and wrote three volumes of poetry about her years of coping with her illness, died December 30, 2005 at her home in New York City. She was 47. In lengthy poems made up of unusually long lines, Dent traveled through the maze of doctors, hospitals and treatments that filled close to 20 of her 47 years. She referred to her AIDS diagnosis as “my life totaled in an indifferent instant to a disappointing sum.” Dent explored her physical and emotional reality in graphic detail in her three volumes of poetry What Silence Equals (1993), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), and Black Milk (2005). HIV, Mon Amour won the James Laughlin Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Delaware, she graduated from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University. Besides poetry, Dent wrote critical essays and reviews for several literary and art journals. She contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from her college boyfriend, a hemophiliac who later died of AIDS. Nine years later she was diagnosed with AIDS. She married Sean Harvey in 1999. In addition to him, she is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Melissa.
Lambda Literary Update: Teresa DeCrescenzo has joined the Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation. So far, the Foundation has raised almost $15,000 since December 1, 2005. The Lambda Literary Awards this year will be in May in Washington, D.C., and again in conjunction with Book Expo. The Lambda Book Report will return as a quarterly publication this spring, providing reviews of LGBT books, as well as interviews, features, and lists of resources for the LGBT literary community.
Kudos: The American Library Association has announced the 2006 Stonewall Book Awards. The Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature went to Abha Dawesar, for Babyji, a coming-of-age tale about a free-spirited lesbian teenager in New Delhi. The Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction went to Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the ’70s in San Francisco, a look at the life of disco singer Sylvester James. The awards will be presented at the 2006 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June. Other honorees in the literature category include Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, and The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D’Allesandro, edited by Kevin Killian. In the nonfiction category, honorees include My One-night Stand With Cancer by Tania Katan, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 by Matt Houlbrook, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays by Larry Kramer (Tarcher/Penguin). Gay Scottish writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award for The Accidental. Brokeback Mountain was named picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America. The film also won Best Drama and Best Screenplay from the Golden Globes and Ang Lee was named Best Director by the Directors Guild of America. The film also received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, and nine BAFTA nominations, including Best Film. Brokeback Mountain and Capote were also among GLAAD Media Award nominations for Outstanding Film - Wide Release and for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild. Capote was named the Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics. The movie also won the 18th annual University of Southern California Scripter Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for his performance as the author and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Mysterious Skin, the film adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film - Limited Release.
Open calls: Editor and author Toby Johnson is looking for inspiration fiction, anecdotes, and essays of positive aspects of gay experience and faith for a new anthology to be titled Charmed Lives: Spinning Straw into Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story. The anthology will be published by Lethe Press. Deadline is July 1, 2006. Email tobyjohnso@aol.com for moredetails.
Queer Foundation: The newly-formed Queer Foundation is offering three $1,000 college scholarships to winners of a high school English essay contest. The theme of the 2006 competition is homelessness. The collected essays will help form curriculum materials for use in high schools to benefit LGBTQ students. The awarded scholarships will be for studies in queer theory or a related field at a U.S. college or university. The Queer Foundation is a nonprofit corporation and 501(c)(3) public charity located in Seattle, Washington. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information of an application form, visit http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/queerfoundation/.
Beat Hotel: The spirit of William S. Burroughs lives on in a small hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California, where a month-long 92nd birthday celebration kicks off on February 4th. The Beat Hotel is just a ten-minute drive from Palm Springs and was renovated in 2003 to celebrate the life and work of Burroughs. Each of the eight guestrooms is decorated with photos and artwork by the author, Beat era furniture, and a vintage typewriter. There is also an onsite library featuring various works and first editions of the Beat Generation. Neil Woodburn of the traveler’s weblog, www.Gadling.com, recently posted that the hotel is based upon the original “Beat Hotel” in Paris, at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, where, between 1957-1963 Burroughs, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat artists lived. Burroughs wrote most of Naked Lunch at the Parisian hotel, while Ginsburg penned his famous poem, Kaddish. (The Parisian hotel is now called Relais Hotel du Vieux and still accepts guests.) Burroughs 92nd Birthday Festivities at The Beat Hotel’s InterZone Beat Festival include a Harold Chapman photography exhibition, performances by Husker Du singer/songwriter Grant Hart, slide shows, and various book exhibitions.
A month of literary scandals: So much has been written and discussed elsewhere that I only have to mention a few names for anyone to know what I am referring to: James Frey, JT LeRoy, Nasdijj. A month of literary scandals. Boom! Wham! Pow! And each with some sort of queer connection. Let’s start with LeRoy, or should we say Laura Albert, a 40-year-old middle class white woman from Brooklyn, NY, and Savannah Knoop, a twentysomething wannabe model who hoodwinked an agent, publishers, critics, celebrities, and the book-buying public into believing they were a transgender, HIV-positive writer. And Frey? While every reporter on the beat was ready to shoot down A Million Little Pieces for its embellishments, the word still seems to be out about the gay title character on Frey’s follow-up book, My Friend Leonard. And Nasdijj? The Navajo memoirist turned out to be none other than gay-erotica writer Timothy Patrick Barrus (who is married to a woman and father of a daughter). And the impact of all this fiction in fact is only just beginning to be seen. St. Martin’s Press recently added a sticker to the dedication page of the advance readers’ copies of Augusten Burrough’s latest book, Possible Side Effects: True Stories, to be released in May. It says: “Author’s Note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well.” According to the New York Post gossip column Page Six, St. Martin’s also added disclaimers to Burroughs’s other books, including Running with Scissors and Dry.
Passages: Betty Berzon, pioneer gay rights activist, psychotherapist, and writer, died January 24, 2006. She was 78. She was the founder of Southern California Women for Understanding, as well as co-founder of California Gay Academic Union. She was a founding board chair of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and board member of numerous gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, including the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where she developed a gay and lesbian peer counselor training program; Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation where she created the personal growth program that resulted in the book, Positively Gay (1979); National Gay Rights Advocates, the first public interest law firm to focus on gay rights, and the Community Guild, a groundbreaking effort to assist low-income gay and lesbian seniors. She was also producer of Gaythink, the first national conference to bring together gay and lesbian faculty and students. In 1971, during a UCLA conference called “The Homosexual in America,” Berzon became the first psychotherapist in the country to publicly declare herself as a gay mental health professional. An expert in small group process, Berzon worked with renowned researcher Evelyn Hooker to develop a series of encounter groups for gays and lesbians, called the Quest for Love. Later, she developed a series for Bell and Howell called The Encountertapes, a growth program for leaderless groups, which led to her first edited book, Encounter Groups: First Facts. Berzon practiced psychotherapy with groups and couples for the last twenty-five years of her life, during which time she also wrote four more books, including the best-selling Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships that Last (1988); The Intimacy Dance: A Guide to Long-Term Success in Gay and Lesbian Relationships (1996); Setting Them Straight : You CAN Do Something About Bigotry and Homophobia in Your Life (1996); and Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best autobiography in 2003. Berzon is survived by her partner of thirty-three years, Teresa DeCrescenzo. Also survived by her sister, Dr. Stephanie Miller of Lancaster Ohio; stepmother, Trude Berzon of Des Moines Iowa and North Palm Beach, Florida; stepsister Barbara Kaplan of North Palm Beach, Florida; cousins Sidney, Shirley, Jerry, Sandy, Mary, Dan, and Abbe Wool; and eight nieces and nephews. Teresa DeCrescenzo has requested that donations may be made in Betty’s honor to the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and Lambda Literary Foundation.
Anyda Marchant, a retired attorney, novelist and publisher, died January 11, 2006 at her home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She was 94. Ms. Marchant was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, moving with her family to Washington, DC, at age six. After earning her undergraduate degree and, in 1933, her law degree from what is now George Washington University, she was admitted to practice in DC and Virginia, before the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. She was one of the first female attorneys with the law firm now known as Covington and Burling. She served briefly in private practice and with the U.S. Commerce Dept. before moving to the legal department of the World Bank where she worked for 18 years until her 1972 retirement. In 1972 Marchant and her life partner Muriel Crawford created the Naiad Press with Barbara Grier and Donna McBride. The first novel published by Naiad was Marchant’s The Latecomer, written under the pen name Sarah Aldridge. In 1974, Naiad was formally incorporated, proceeding to publish eleven Sarah Aldridge novels, as well as a wide selection of other feminist and lesbian writers, including Jane Rule, Isabel Miller, Ann Bannon, and Sarah Schulman, among many others. Marchant served as Naiad’s president from its inception until the mid 1990’s. In 1995 Marchant and Crawford founded their own publishing company, A&M Books of Rehoboth Beach. A&M published the last three Sarah Aldridge novels (the latest in 2003), along with the book As I Lay Frying - a Rehoboth Beach Memoir by author Fay Jacobs. Passionate about supporting feminist writers, Marchant continued her publishing and mentoring activities until very recently, highlighted by the October 2005 release of the novel Celebrating Hotchclaw by feminist literary icon Ann Allen Shockley. Marchant is survived by Crawford, her partner of 57 years, as well as a large circle of loving friends. A Donations may be made in Marchant’s name to CAMP Rehoboth, Compassionate Care Hospice, or All Saints Episcopal Church Building Fund (all located within Rehoboth Beach, Delaware).
Tory Dent, an award-winning poet who was diagnosed with HIV at age 30, later developed AIDS and wrote three volumes of poetry about her years of coping with her illness, died December 30, 2005 at her home in New York City. She was 47. In lengthy poems made up of unusually long lines, Dent traveled through the maze of doctors, hospitals and treatments that filled close to 20 of her 47 years. She referred to her AIDS diagnosis as “my life totaled in an indifferent instant to a disappointing sum.” Dent explored her physical and emotional reality in graphic detail in her three volumes of poetry What Silence Equals (1993), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), and Black Milk (2005). HIV, Mon Amour won the James Laughlin Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Delaware, she graduated from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University. Besides poetry, Dent wrote critical essays and reviews for several literary and art journals. She contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from her college boyfriend, a hemophiliac who later died of AIDS. Nine years later she was diagnosed with AIDS. She married Sean Harvey in 1999. In addition to him, she is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Melissa.
Friday, December 30, 2005
January 2006 Publishing Notes
The buzz: Two years ago, South African author Nadine Gordimer gathered twenty of her friends and fellow writers to publish Telling Tales, a collection of short stories whose proceeds would go to HIV/AIDS organizations. In December 2005, she presented a cheque for R1,449,248 to the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). Among the forthcoming books at Suspect Thoughts Press are Sweet Son of Pan, a collection of poetry by Trebor Healey, and A History of Barbed Wire, a collection of short stories by Jeff Mann. In the fall of 2006, Da Capo will publish Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage by journalist David Valdes Greenwood, about a gay couple’s ten-year relationship and the adoption of their baby girl. A Parisfal, a play by the late Susan Sontag, will premiere in February at Performance Space 122 in the East Village. Author-playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein has been signed for a half-hour show for the Fox network. Among the movies set to premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival are The Night Listener, an adaptation of the Amistead Maupin novel starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette, and Freida Lee Mock’s Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, a portrait of the openly gay Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. After a devastating fire in 2004, Spartacus Books in Vancouver has re-opened at 319 West Hastings, next door to the store’s original site. A new gay bookstore has opened in Paris: Librairie Altérité at 9 rue des Gâtines in the 20th arrondissement. And Lambda Literary Foundation Board member Katharine Forrest’s recent letter to Books To Watch Out For indicated that there may be new life yet for the Lambda Book Report. Stay tuned.
Kudos: Author and composer Ned Rorem received a Grammy nomination in the category of Classical Contemporary Composition for the recording of Nine Episodes for Four Players (Contrasts Quarter). Author Maureen McHugh is one of the three finalists for The Story Prize, for her collection of 13 stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, published by Small Beer Press. The prize will be announced January 25, 2006 and the winning author receives $20,000. The finalists for the 2005 ISO Violet Quill Award are Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, Bilal’s Bread by Sulayman X, A Really Nice Prom Mess by Brian Sloan, Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate, Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, and The First Verse by Barry McCrae. The film version of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain received Best Picture nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, as well as seven Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture. It’s also landed on numerous Top 10 lists including those from the American Film Institute, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Online. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to collect praise for his title role in Capote. The actor has received acting nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Online, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Forth Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Toronto Film Critics Association, and a nomination from the Golden Globes.
Open calls: Deadline for submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2007 is April 15, 2006. Richard Labonté is the series ongoing editor and Timothy J. Lambert is this year’s judge. E-mail submissions to: bge2007@gmail.com. Rachel Kramer Bussel and Christopher Pierce are editing three anthologies for Alyson: What Lies Beneath: Erotic Stories about Underware and Lingerie, The Sexiest Soles: Erotic Stories About Feet and Shoes, and Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage. Deadline is January 15, 2006 for all three books. E-mail submissions to rachelkb@gmail.com and christopherpierce2001@yahoo.com. Starbooks Press is back in action and looking for submissions to several new anthologies: Deadline for Muscle Worshipers, edited by Eric Summers, is February 1, 2006. Email eric@starbookspress.com. Summers is also editing the anthology Love in a Lock-Up for Starbooks. Deadline is August 30, 2006. E-mail submissions to eric@starbookspress.com. Cleis Press is looking for stories for several anthologies. Tom Graham is editing Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. Deadline for submissions is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to CowboysBook@aol.com. Cleis is also looking for submissions for After Midnight: True Lesbian Sex Confessions. Deadline is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to AfterMidBook@aol.com. Johnny Hansen is editing Trucker Sex: True Gay Erotica for Cleis. Deadline is February 1, 2006. E-mail submissions to TruckersBook@aol.com. Cleis is also inaugurating Best Gay Romance 2007. Deadline is February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestGayRomance@aol.com. For Best Lesbian Romance 2007, deadline is also February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestLesbian@aol.com. Lethe Press is looking for submissions for Tales from the Den: Wild and Weird Stories for Bears. Deadline is March 31, 2006. E-mail submissions to lethepress@aol.com
Passages: Hallam Tennyson, the great-grandson of British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was found stabbed to death at his North London home in December 2005. The body of Tennyson, 85, a former BBC executive, was found by a former partner. Several newspapers reported that Tennyson led a “flamboyant and “colorful lifestyle,” often inviting men back to his apartment up to three times per week. In 1998, Tennyson, writing about his sexual orientation, said, “Lord Tennyson, my great-grandfather, lived from 1809 to 1892 and would, no doubt, be absolutely horrified by me. He was a sexual prude, whereas I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to sex.” Tennyson, survived by two children and seven grandchildren, was married for 30 years and was up-front with his wife about his sexual orientation. “I told Margo before we married that I was a homosexual, but she did not know what that meant,” he wrote. “I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t mind. Looking back, we were terribly rational about it. I went to see a psychiatrist, who told me, quite ridiculously, that it was just a passing phase and that the love of a good woman could change me.” Tennyson also penned an autobiography in 1984 (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Volumes 1 and 2), discussing a gay-bashing incident as well as his many trysts: “Instead of spending hours haunting public lavatories or other pick-up points, I might have read several books as long as War and Peace—I might even have written one.”
Kudos: Author and composer Ned Rorem received a Grammy nomination in the category of Classical Contemporary Composition for the recording of Nine Episodes for Four Players (Contrasts Quarter). Author Maureen McHugh is one of the three finalists for The Story Prize, for her collection of 13 stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, published by Small Beer Press. The prize will be announced January 25, 2006 and the winning author receives $20,000. The finalists for the 2005 ISO Violet Quill Award are Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, Bilal’s Bread by Sulayman X, A Really Nice Prom Mess by Brian Sloan, Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate, Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, and The First Verse by Barry McCrae. The film version of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain received Best Picture nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, as well as seven Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture. It’s also landed on numerous Top 10 lists including those from the American Film Institute, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Online. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to collect praise for his title role in Capote. The actor has received acting nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Online, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Forth Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Toronto Film Critics Association, and a nomination from the Golden Globes.
Open calls: Deadline for submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2007 is April 15, 2006. Richard Labonté is the series ongoing editor and Timothy J. Lambert is this year’s judge. E-mail submissions to: bge2007@gmail.com. Rachel Kramer Bussel and Christopher Pierce are editing three anthologies for Alyson: What Lies Beneath: Erotic Stories about Underware and Lingerie, The Sexiest Soles: Erotic Stories About Feet and Shoes, and Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage. Deadline is January 15, 2006 for all three books. E-mail submissions to rachelkb@gmail.com and christopherpierce2001@yahoo.com. Starbooks Press is back in action and looking for submissions to several new anthologies: Deadline for Muscle Worshipers, edited by Eric Summers, is February 1, 2006. Email eric@starbookspress.com. Summers is also editing the anthology Love in a Lock-Up for Starbooks. Deadline is August 30, 2006. E-mail submissions to eric@starbookspress.com. Cleis Press is looking for stories for several anthologies. Tom Graham is editing Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. Deadline for submissions is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to CowboysBook@aol.com. Cleis is also looking for submissions for After Midnight: True Lesbian Sex Confessions. Deadline is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to AfterMidBook@aol.com. Johnny Hansen is editing Trucker Sex: True Gay Erotica for Cleis. Deadline is February 1, 2006. E-mail submissions to TruckersBook@aol.com. Cleis is also inaugurating Best Gay Romance 2007. Deadline is February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestGayRomance@aol.com. For Best Lesbian Romance 2007, deadline is also February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestLesbian@aol.com. Lethe Press is looking for submissions for Tales from the Den: Wild and Weird Stories for Bears. Deadline is March 31, 2006. E-mail submissions to lethepress@aol.com
Passages: Hallam Tennyson, the great-grandson of British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was found stabbed to death at his North London home in December 2005. The body of Tennyson, 85, a former BBC executive, was found by a former partner. Several newspapers reported that Tennyson led a “flamboyant and “colorful lifestyle,” often inviting men back to his apartment up to three times per week. In 1998, Tennyson, writing about his sexual orientation, said, “Lord Tennyson, my great-grandfather, lived from 1809 to 1892 and would, no doubt, be absolutely horrified by me. He was a sexual prude, whereas I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to sex.” Tennyson, survived by two children and seven grandchildren, was married for 30 years and was up-front with his wife about his sexual orientation. “I told Margo before we married that I was a homosexual, but she did not know what that meant,” he wrote. “I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t mind. Looking back, we were terribly rational about it. I went to see a psychiatrist, who told me, quite ridiculously, that it was just a passing phase and that the love of a good woman could change me.” Tennyson also penned an autobiography in 1984 (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Volumes 1 and 2), discussing a gay-bashing incident as well as his many trysts: “Instead of spending hours haunting public lavatories or other pick-up points, I might have read several books as long as War and Peace—I might even have written one.”
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
