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.”
Friday, December 30, 2005
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Monday, October 31, 2005
November Publishing Notes
The buzz: Charles Flowers has been appointed the new Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation. Brendan Lemon stepped down as the editor-in-chief of the gay monthly Out. Euan Morton, who starred as Boy George in the musical Taboo, will play the lead in Brundibar and Comedy on the Bridge, two new operas by Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak. CNN reporter Anderson Cooper has officially landed a book contract with HarperCollins. The not-yet-written memoir was bought for $1 million by HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, who will be editing the book himself. The book will deal with the last year of Cooper’s life as a journalist and human being in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq, and Louisiana/Mississippi. Most of the proceeds will go to charity. The recent success of the film Capote has sparked an interest in the author’s books. USA Today reported that Vintage is now in its third printing of the movie tie-in edition of In Cold Blood. Gerald Clarke’s Capote, A Biography, the basis for the recent movie, has also seen a surge in sales.
Kudos: Houston resident Greg Chapman was selected from among 6,000 entrants to read his essay about putting aside the teachings of childhood and embracing his homosexuality on “This I Believe,” a series of weekly essays featured on National Public Radio. James Purdy received the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Mercantile Library of New York for his controversial gay novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works, published in 1967, two years before the Stonewall Riots. The award carries a $5,000 cash prize from Bookspan. The novel was selected by Jonathan Frazen as the most memorable book published at least a decade ago. Julie Marie Wade of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania won the Fourth Annual Oscar Wilde Award sponsored by Gival Press for her poem entitled “The Lunar Plexus.” An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Women Studies, edited by Robert L. Giron and Dr. Brianne Friel, won the 2005 DIY Book Award for Compilations/Anthologies. The book includes essays by lesbian writers Teresa Bevin and Rita Kranidis. PressPassQ reported that the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association has established a Hall of Fame. Initial inductees include NLGJA founder, the late Leroy Aarons (who in retirement sat on the board of the LGBT publication We The People); partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-editors of the The Ladder, considered America's first publication (1956) for lesbian readers; the late Sarah Pettit, co-founder and editor of Out magazine (1992); the late Randy Shilts, whose career included a stint at The Advocate; and the late Don Slater, founder and editor of the crusading gay publication, ONE, whose five-year battle against antigay U.S. postal rules ended in a 1958 U.S. Supreme Court victory for all gay media. Among the titles which made Time magazine’s Best All-Time Novels were The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Deliverence by James Dickey, Falconer by John Cheever, Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Open calls: Amie M. Evans is accepting submissions for an anthology titled Drag Kings: Short Story Erotica involving drag kings on or off the stage. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information write pussywhippedproductions@hotmail.com. Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is seeking essays up to 6,000 words for an anthology titled Realness Is Overrated: Rejecting the Requirement to Pass. Essays should explore and critique the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of passing. Deadline is January 31, 2006. For more details and submission guidelines, e-mail mattilda@sbcglobal.net.
The Lone Star State of Mind: Members of the American Veterans in Domestic Defense staged protests at six local libraries in Montgomery Country. The group cut up 70 books they considered “perverted” and containing pornographic pictures or promoting homosexuality. Some of the titles include It’s Perfectly Normal, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Plastic Man. St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a private school in Austin, declined a $3 million donation rather than cut a gay-themed short story from the English curriculum. English teacher Kimberly Horne has included the short story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, a love story of two gay cowboys, as optional reading in her high school class for several years. The Austin American Statesman reported that parents Cary and Kate McNair met with other parents and school authorities and objected to the short story and the school’s participation in Day of Silence, an annual event that seeks to address antigay discrimination on school campuses. McNair is the son of oil magnate Robert McNair, owner of the Houston Texans pro football team. After the school refused to remove “Brokeback Mountain” from the assignment list, the McNairs pulled a $3 million pledge.
Between the Lines: If my recollections are right, I heard of Sam D’Allesandro in several ways. First, there was “Nothing Ever Just Disappears,” his short story that was included in the anthology Men on Men, edited by George Stambolian and published in 1986 by Plume. Before the deluge of gay-themed fiction and erotica anthologies of this century, twentysomething years ago in the last one there was just Men on Men and a few gay bookstores where this particular anthology could be found, and for those of us trying to imagine ourselves as a new breed of writer — a gay writer writing about gay life — being included in Men on Men meant that Sam was already some kind of god-like talent. A few years later I learned of The Zombie Pit, Sam’s collection of short stories which arrived in 1989, because I knew of Crossing Press, having had a correspondence with editor John Gill over a potential collection of my own short stories (and which didn’t come to pass). At the time I was living in exile in New Hope, Pennsylvania, after a decade of struggling in New York City, quietly having a breakdown after the death of a friend, disassembling all the pieces of my psyche, repairing and polishing them, and reassembling them into what I was hoping would be a new and improved model of the cheerful young man I had once been. I’m not exactly sure where I picked up my copy of The Zombie Pit — it must have been at either the Oscar Wilde Bookshop or A Different Light during a weekend jaunt back into New York City — or maybe even at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, but wherever I purchased it, when I sat down to read it, I was struck by lighting when I came to the second story titled “Electrical Type of Thing.” “Electrical Type of Thing” is the story of a young man obsessed with another man who, as the story progresses, becomes obsessed with another young man. Also, as this simply written episodic tale unfolds, the first young man finds another man who becomes obsessed with him. In other words, guy likes guy likes another guy in a sort of series of overlapping triangles. Before I read this short story I had always dreamed of taking the best parts and traits of one boyfriend and graphing them onto another imperfect boyfriend, in hopes of creating the ideal kind of boyfriend — or at least the sort of perfect one that I could set out and search for. Having that sort of romantic quest, I was usually unfulfilled in matters of both love and sex. Somehow, it had never dawned on me that I might be a different person with different people as Sam so vividly explains in that story and my psychological awakening of that notion was a truly inspired moment — the kind of thing whereby a reader turns to fiction in order to better understand his own life, to find his world illuminated and explained in a way he might not be able to grasp himself, and zing-zap-crash-boom! — it actually happens, only it is something different than what he thought he would find. Mind it, that year I was still a neophyte in affairs with men and grieving over just about everything that had come to pass thus far in my life. And the truth of the matter was I discovered “Electrical Type of Thing” at the same time I was discovering a lot of other first-rate writers — at the time I was also slowly making my way through Echo Press’s thirteen volumes of the Collected Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. But my psychological awakening of what to expect from sexual relationships also incorporated an awareness that Sam D’Allesandro was a very talented writer and that the bitter truth was his bright light had already been diminished. In the back pages of The Zombie Pit was a chronological time line of Sam’s life, with the startling fact that he had died February 3, 1988, at the age of thirty-one, a year or so before I had ever picked up this book. For years I’ve held onto my copy of The Zombie Pit and used “Electrical Type of Thing” as one of those occasional touchstones a writer often refers back to, turning to it for inspiration when an idea strikes me and I begin to work my way into writing a new story or to revisit to see if a final version of a story is working as well as I hope it does — and I can trace Sam’s influence on a string of stories I’ve written over the years — particularly those triangular ones where matters of the heart often intersect with the realities of sex. So it’s heartwarming to discover that good gay writing lasts because it’s good gay writing. Suspect Thoughts Press has recently issued a new collection of Sam’s writings titled The Wild Creatures. Delightfully included is “Electrical Type of Thing,” a story I hope many other would-be gay writers will discover, enjoy, and find inspiring.
Passages: Theodore ‘Tobias’ Schneebaum, artist, author, and anthropologist, died September 20 2005 in Great Neck, NY, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was in his mid-80s and a longtime resident of Greenwich Village. In 2000, Mr. Schneebaum was the subject of the documentary, Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, which follows his return to the Amazon and to Indonesian New Guinea, where he also lived. Mr. Schneebaum came to prominence in 1969 with the publication of his memoir, also titled Keep the River on Your Right, which was published by Grove Press. The book, a cult classic, described how a mild-mannered gay New York artist wound up living among, and ardently loving, the Arakmbut, an indigenous cannibalistic people in the rain forest of Peru. In 1955, Mr. Schneebaum, then a painter, had won a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Peru. There, he vanished into the jungle and was presumed dead. Seven months later, he emerged, naked and covered in body paint. After his return to New York, Schneebaum travelled widely, often visiting isolated people, and settled in New Guinea in 1973, where he spent 10 years studying the art of the Asmat head-hunters in Irian Jaya and serving as assistant curator of an art museum. He also took a married tribesman lover, named Aipit. His other published works include Wild Man, Where the Spirits Dwell, and Secret Places: My life in New York and New Guinea.
Kudos: Houston resident Greg Chapman was selected from among 6,000 entrants to read his essay about putting aside the teachings of childhood and embracing his homosexuality on “This I Believe,” a series of weekly essays featured on National Public Radio. James Purdy received the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Mercantile Library of New York for his controversial gay novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works, published in 1967, two years before the Stonewall Riots. The award carries a $5,000 cash prize from Bookspan. The novel was selected by Jonathan Frazen as the most memorable book published at least a decade ago. Julie Marie Wade of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania won the Fourth Annual Oscar Wilde Award sponsored by Gival Press for her poem entitled “The Lunar Plexus.” An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Women Studies, edited by Robert L. Giron and Dr. Brianne Friel, won the 2005 DIY Book Award for Compilations/Anthologies. The book includes essays by lesbian writers Teresa Bevin and Rita Kranidis. PressPassQ reported that the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association has established a Hall of Fame. Initial inductees include NLGJA founder, the late Leroy Aarons (who in retirement sat on the board of the LGBT publication We The People); partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, co-editors of the The Ladder, considered America's first publication (1956) for lesbian readers; the late Sarah Pettit, co-founder and editor of Out magazine (1992); the late Randy Shilts, whose career included a stint at The Advocate; and the late Don Slater, founder and editor of the crusading gay publication, ONE, whose five-year battle against antigay U.S. postal rules ended in a 1958 U.S. Supreme Court victory for all gay media. Among the titles which made Time magazine’s Best All-Time Novels were The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Deliverence by James Dickey, Falconer by John Cheever, Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Open calls: Amie M. Evans is accepting submissions for an anthology titled Drag Kings: Short Story Erotica involving drag kings on or off the stage. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information write pussywhippedproductions@hotmail.com. Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, is seeking essays up to 6,000 words for an anthology titled Realness Is Overrated: Rejecting the Requirement to Pass. Essays should explore and critique the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of passing. Deadline is January 31, 2006. For more details and submission guidelines, e-mail mattilda@sbcglobal.net.
The Lone Star State of Mind: Members of the American Veterans in Domestic Defense staged protests at six local libraries in Montgomery Country. The group cut up 70 books they considered “perverted” and containing pornographic pictures or promoting homosexuality. Some of the titles include It’s Perfectly Normal, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Plastic Man. St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a private school in Austin, declined a $3 million donation rather than cut a gay-themed short story from the English curriculum. English teacher Kimberly Horne has included the short story “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, a love story of two gay cowboys, as optional reading in her high school class for several years. The Austin American Statesman reported that parents Cary and Kate McNair met with other parents and school authorities and objected to the short story and the school’s participation in Day of Silence, an annual event that seeks to address antigay discrimination on school campuses. McNair is the son of oil magnate Robert McNair, owner of the Houston Texans pro football team. After the school refused to remove “Brokeback Mountain” from the assignment list, the McNairs pulled a $3 million pledge.
Between the Lines: If my recollections are right, I heard of Sam D’Allesandro in several ways. First, there was “Nothing Ever Just Disappears,” his short story that was included in the anthology Men on Men, edited by George Stambolian and published in 1986 by Plume. Before the deluge of gay-themed fiction and erotica anthologies of this century, twentysomething years ago in the last one there was just Men on Men and a few gay bookstores where this particular anthology could be found, and for those of us trying to imagine ourselves as a new breed of writer — a gay writer writing about gay life — being included in Men on Men meant that Sam was already some kind of god-like talent. A few years later I learned of The Zombie Pit, Sam’s collection of short stories which arrived in 1989, because I knew of Crossing Press, having had a correspondence with editor John Gill over a potential collection of my own short stories (and which didn’t come to pass). At the time I was living in exile in New Hope, Pennsylvania, after a decade of struggling in New York City, quietly having a breakdown after the death of a friend, disassembling all the pieces of my psyche, repairing and polishing them, and reassembling them into what I was hoping would be a new and improved model of the cheerful young man I had once been. I’m not exactly sure where I picked up my copy of The Zombie Pit — it must have been at either the Oscar Wilde Bookshop or A Different Light during a weekend jaunt back into New York City — or maybe even at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, but wherever I purchased it, when I sat down to read it, I was struck by lighting when I came to the second story titled “Electrical Type of Thing.” “Electrical Type of Thing” is the story of a young man obsessed with another man who, as the story progresses, becomes obsessed with another young man. Also, as this simply written episodic tale unfolds, the first young man finds another man who becomes obsessed with him. In other words, guy likes guy likes another guy in a sort of series of overlapping triangles. Before I read this short story I had always dreamed of taking the best parts and traits of one boyfriend and graphing them onto another imperfect boyfriend, in hopes of creating the ideal kind of boyfriend — or at least the sort of perfect one that I could set out and search for. Having that sort of romantic quest, I was usually unfulfilled in matters of both love and sex. Somehow, it had never dawned on me that I might be a different person with different people as Sam so vividly explains in that story and my psychological awakening of that notion was a truly inspired moment — the kind of thing whereby a reader turns to fiction in order to better understand his own life, to find his world illuminated and explained in a way he might not be able to grasp himself, and zing-zap-crash-boom! — it actually happens, only it is something different than what he thought he would find. Mind it, that year I was still a neophyte in affairs with men and grieving over just about everything that had come to pass thus far in my life. And the truth of the matter was I discovered “Electrical Type of Thing” at the same time I was discovering a lot of other first-rate writers — at the time I was also slowly making my way through Echo Press’s thirteen volumes of the Collected Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. But my psychological awakening of what to expect from sexual relationships also incorporated an awareness that Sam D’Allesandro was a very talented writer and that the bitter truth was his bright light had already been diminished. In the back pages of The Zombie Pit was a chronological time line of Sam’s life, with the startling fact that he had died February 3, 1988, at the age of thirty-one, a year or so before I had ever picked up this book. For years I’ve held onto my copy of The Zombie Pit and used “Electrical Type of Thing” as one of those occasional touchstones a writer often refers back to, turning to it for inspiration when an idea strikes me and I begin to work my way into writing a new story or to revisit to see if a final version of a story is working as well as I hope it does — and I can trace Sam’s influence on a string of stories I’ve written over the years — particularly those triangular ones where matters of the heart often intersect with the realities of sex. So it’s heartwarming to discover that good gay writing lasts because it’s good gay writing. Suspect Thoughts Press has recently issued a new collection of Sam’s writings titled The Wild Creatures. Delightfully included is “Electrical Type of Thing,” a story I hope many other would-be gay writers will discover, enjoy, and find inspiring.
Passages: Theodore ‘Tobias’ Schneebaum, artist, author, and anthropologist, died September 20 2005 in Great Neck, NY, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was in his mid-80s and a longtime resident of Greenwich Village. In 2000, Mr. Schneebaum was the subject of the documentary, Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, which follows his return to the Amazon and to Indonesian New Guinea, where he also lived. Mr. Schneebaum came to prominence in 1969 with the publication of his memoir, also titled Keep the River on Your Right, which was published by Grove Press. The book, a cult classic, described how a mild-mannered gay New York artist wound up living among, and ardently loving, the Arakmbut, an indigenous cannibalistic people in the rain forest of Peru. In 1955, Mr. Schneebaum, then a painter, had won a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Peru. There, he vanished into the jungle and was presumed dead. Seven months later, he emerged, naked and covered in body paint. After his return to New York, Schneebaum travelled widely, often visiting isolated people, and settled in New Guinea in 1973, where he spent 10 years studying the art of the Asmat head-hunters in Irian Jaya and serving as assistant curator of an art museum. He also took a married tribesman lover, named Aipit. His other published works include Wild Man, Where the Spirits Dwell, and Secret Places: My life in New York and New Guinea.
Friday, October 07, 2005
More on the City We Can’t Forget About
Big Easy Glimpses from Suspect Thoughts: The talented, generous, and big-hearted duo of Ian Philips and Greg Wharton offered more updates on Big Easy writers in their recent Suspect Thoughts newsletter. On poet Martin Pousson: Greg and Ian note he went to stay at his parents home in Lafayette to ride out Hurricane Katrina only to have to evacuate Lafayette to avoid Hurricane Rita -- and ended up in a dry county on the Louisiana/Arkansas border (a cruel fate for any child of the Big Easy). But the good news is he's back in Lafayette now and gearing up for a return to New Orleans to rebuild his beloved city. On Jamie Joy Gatto: To say Jamie Joy Gatto and her fiance Ben have been through hell since Katrina is to sugarcoat the concept of hell. What they and thousands of others experienced in New Orleans (and her posts at her Yahoo group tell the horrors, at the hands of those entrusted to serve and protect, they endured at the Convention Center), no one should have. And you can go here and tell Jamie Joy yourself and see how you can help. Sage Vivant and M. Christian were able to raise $1100 for Jamie Joy and Ben. If you want to tell Sage she's one righteous writer (and she is), send her an email through her Web site Custom Erotica Source. On Elyn Selu: Greg and I mentioned in last month's newsletter that Elyn Selu's house was underwater after the flooding. We got this email from her and Brad to send along to everyone in SuspectThoughtsLand. (If you don't know Elyn, she's one of the coolest and kindest people I've met. She's continually warming up the flames of pagan abandon on a planet that desperately needs it.) "Brad and I are staying with my family in Charlotte. He'll be returning to New Orleans this week to help others get wired up. Our house is slowly being drained, but we don't know when they'll let us into our neighbor hood. Anyone who wants to contact me can through: maevesintent@yahoo.com -- or read about my meltdowns and water phobias on secretpink at livejournal.com. P.S. if anyone out there has an online screenplay workshop they know of, please drop me a line. I've got one that needs critiquing and I need something to write about besides dark brown water and bushisms." On C. Bard Cole and Dimitri Apessos: Author D. Travers Scott wrote to say that C. Bard Cole (Briefly Told Lives) had moved to New Orleans after receiving his graduate degree in Alabama this spring. But he and fellow author Dimitri Apessos made it out of New Orleans safely to Nashville. You can learn more from Bard's blog. On Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth: Patricia Nell Warren wrote to say that Saints & Sinners panel facilitator Claude Summers and his partner Ted-Larry Pebworth were safe and with friends in Baton Rouge. Also Timm Holt, owner of Cowpokes, a bar that has hosted several S&S events over the years, is okay and with his sister in Illinois. And that Gary Taylor, a reviewer from Biloxi, MS, who has written about many gay titles on Amazon.com and attended last year's Saints & Sinners, is safe with his partner, R.J., with friends in Florida. On Travis Montez: Brilliant poet and lawyer (yes, it can happen) Travis Montez wrote to say that all his family in his home state of Mississippi are fine, but they experienced a great deal of property damage. You can read more on his blog. More on Rip and Marsha Naquin-Delain: Rip and Marsha, the forces behind New Orleans's Ambush magazine as well as the hosts of the fabulous Friday night welcome party for Saints & Sinners, rode out Katrina in their home in the French Quarter, but had to leave later when the looting began. We hope they are back in New Orleans now and look forward to toasting New Orleans's and their good health next may. You can read their story at Ambush's Katrina Web page. On author Marty Hyatt: The author of the forthcoming A Scarecrow's Bible says the he and all his family are safe, though most are displaced. From Robbie Daw: Instinct magazine's managing editor about his aunt and cousin: "My aunt and cousin made it safely out of New Orleans to Beaumont, TX, but, like most people in their situation, have no money, no food, etc. They can't even get anyone to tell them where they should go or who to talk to for any kind of relief." From O'Neil De Noux: "We escaped. Our home in Jefferson Parish was hit pretty hard with three trees through the roof, hurricane force wind damage inside and water damage, although our house didn't float away. We are presently jobless but have been taken in by some good people here in Lake Charles, LA and have a roof over our heads." On Patrick Ryan: The founder and editor-in-chief of Lodestar Quarterly, and truly one of the kindest laborers in the fields of queer lit, sent us this much more somber note: "Lots of updates. Not all of it good, though. My mom, at least, is safe out here with me. She's going to relocate permanently in San Francisco. She's afraid to go back, at her age, and face the possibility of another killer storm. My brothers all evacuated, too, but they're hoping to go back and be part of the rebuilding process. The worst of the news is that my sister-in-law's cousin, and that cousin's husband and two kids, were killed in Waveland. I hadn't met them before, since I've been out here in San Francisco for awhile, but it's so tragic, in any case. My lesbian cousin, Michelle, her brother, Michael, and their mother, each owned a fairly new home, and all three homes were completely destroyed. Quite a few other cousins lost their homes, too, and one, a close cousin of mine, evacuated to Jackson, Miss, found out he’d lost his house, and then was robbed of all the money he'd taken with him to Jackson, $1,600. My uncle who is down-syndrome and paralyzed was indeed evacuated and is in a new home in Lafayette, so that's good news that he is safe. My mom had cared for him for many years, but when he became paralyzed a few years ago, he had to go into a home. I suppose my mother's story is the happiest of the stories, and the people of San Francisco have been so incredibly generous. The government, on the other hand, has done nothing but impede the solutions. I've run around with FEMA for weeks and have gotten nothing from them. The people in Chalmette, my cousin included, were completely ignored by the government. Canadian forces actually reached them first." You can read Patrick’s mother's story here on Lodestar Quarterly . On Lisa C. Moore: Punk goddess and author Anna Joy Springer forwarded us this email from Tisa Bryant about Lisa C. Moore, founder of the way cool RedBone Press. And many of us will also remember Lisa for all she did to help queer lit while she worked with the Lambda Literary Foundation. (Thank you, Lisa!) Well, now it's time for us to help her. "Dear All, Just sharing this message from my friend, Lisa C. Moore, founder of RedBone Press, which is dedicated to the creativity of queer African-Americans. She was born and raised in New Orleans; all the roots that fortify her life are there. (RedBone Press, P.O. Box 15571, Washington, DC 20003, 202-667-0392 phone, 301-559-5239 fax.) Fortunately, her entire family physically survived the hurricane and flooding, but lost everything, had to leave, as did the key funders for printing her next book. She's searching for a new printer for her next title, Spirited, a collection of writings on faith by Af-Am GLBT folks, so if you know anyone who might be willing donate services or otherwise help her continue her work *affordably*, please contact her at the info listed on her site. She's an amazing human being, and so is her father, musician Deacon John, who is still searching for missing bandmates (his piano player is still missing). Her sister Denise was recently taped for "This American Life," in a segment about her days and nights in the New Orleans Convention Center."
Saints and Sinners Update: Paul Willis and Greg Herren, the fabulous duo of editors and writers and the life force behind the annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival of Queer Writers in New Orleans, are both safe and at work. Greg is back in Louisiana and posts often to his blog, Queer and Loathing in America . A recent email from Paul Willis, now in Illinois, also arrived with an update on the next Saints and Sinners and I’ve posted it below for any and all who want to attend or contribute funds.
*****
"I'd like to thank everyone for their kind emails, good wishes, and offers of help and support. Greg and I were able to get out of New Orleans on Sunday before Katrina ravaged the city. After a stressful drive along with 100,000 other folks fleeing the city at the time, we made our way to my parents place in Kewanee, Illinois. And as luck would have it, Labor Day weekend happened to be Hog Days. We weren't much in the spirit of celebrating but did make our way to the library book sale and the flea market. I was glad to find a hard cover of Val McDermid's novel A Place of Execution.
As I'm sure you all know from your own communities, it has been amazing to me how far reaching the impact of this tragedy has been. Here in Kewanee alone, a couple from Chalmette, LA have relocated staying with friends they met on the internet eight years ago, a woman and her two kids have also temporarily found shelter here in the Hog Capital. Every store is taking collections, individuals are organizing fundraisers, and as of September 7, Kewanee-area residents have given more than $10,000 to relief efforts.
I've slowly, but surely been able to get organized and set up in my new surroundings. But as you can imagine, I can't wait to get home to New Orleans and get my life back. One of the things that I can do while I'm here is to make efforts so that the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival will still take place as scheduled May 12-14, 2006 in the city of New Orleans. I appreciate the interest people have shown in wanting to make sure that the event will continue. If you'd like to make a donation towards this project, checks should be made out to the NO/AIDS Task Force and can be sent to me at my temporary location:
Paul Willis
P.O. Box 102
Kewanee, IL 61443
If you make a donation and/or would like to correspond, please include your email address, and I'll get you added to the e-newsletter list for the Saints and Sinners newsletter so that you can keep updated on the progress we're able to make. The website for the literary festival is www.sasfest.com. Your support will go a long way to benefit the GLBT literary community, the NO/AIDS Task Force, and the city of New Orleans.
The dynamic array of GLBTQ literary talent for this year's Saints & Sinners program is already coming together with presenters to include: Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters, award-winning writers K.M. Soehnlein and Michelle Tea, authors and poets Martin Pousson and Elena Georgiou, along with master classes facilitated by Steven Saylor and Karla Jay. Literary Sponsors include Bold Strokes Books, Bywater Books, DREAMWalker Group, Gival Press, Harrington Park Press, InSightOut Books, Lodestar Quarterly, Suspect Thoughts Press, and Wildcat Press.
Once again, my thanks to everyone for their generosity and support of the New Orleans community.
I'll keep in touch and hope to get the first e-newsletter out by mid-October.
All the best,
Paul J. Willis"
Saints and Sinners Update: Paul Willis and Greg Herren, the fabulous duo of editors and writers and the life force behind the annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival of Queer Writers in New Orleans, are both safe and at work. Greg is back in Louisiana and posts often to his blog, Queer and Loathing in America . A recent email from Paul Willis, now in Illinois, also arrived with an update on the next Saints and Sinners and I’ve posted it below for any and all who want to attend or contribute funds.
*****
"I'd like to thank everyone for their kind emails, good wishes, and offers of help and support. Greg and I were able to get out of New Orleans on Sunday before Katrina ravaged the city. After a stressful drive along with 100,000 other folks fleeing the city at the time, we made our way to my parents place in Kewanee, Illinois. And as luck would have it, Labor Day weekend happened to be Hog Days. We weren't much in the spirit of celebrating but did make our way to the library book sale and the flea market. I was glad to find a hard cover of Val McDermid's novel A Place of Execution.
As I'm sure you all know from your own communities, it has been amazing to me how far reaching the impact of this tragedy has been. Here in Kewanee alone, a couple from Chalmette, LA have relocated staying with friends they met on the internet eight years ago, a woman and her two kids have also temporarily found shelter here in the Hog Capital. Every store is taking collections, individuals are organizing fundraisers, and as of September 7, Kewanee-area residents have given more than $10,000 to relief efforts.
I've slowly, but surely been able to get organized and set up in my new surroundings. But as you can imagine, I can't wait to get home to New Orleans and get my life back. One of the things that I can do while I'm here is to make efforts so that the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival will still take place as scheduled May 12-14, 2006 in the city of New Orleans. I appreciate the interest people have shown in wanting to make sure that the event will continue. If you'd like to make a donation towards this project, checks should be made out to the NO/AIDS Task Force and can be sent to me at my temporary location:
Paul Willis
P.O. Box 102
Kewanee, IL 61443
If you make a donation and/or would like to correspond, please include your email address, and I'll get you added to the e-newsletter list for the Saints and Sinners newsletter so that you can keep updated on the progress we're able to make. The website for the literary festival is www.sasfest.com. Your support will go a long way to benefit the GLBT literary community, the NO/AIDS Task Force, and the city of New Orleans.
The dynamic array of GLBTQ literary talent for this year's Saints & Sinners program is already coming together with presenters to include: Jake Shears from the Scissor Sisters, award-winning writers K.M. Soehnlein and Michelle Tea, authors and poets Martin Pousson and Elena Georgiou, along with master classes facilitated by Steven Saylor and Karla Jay. Literary Sponsors include Bold Strokes Books, Bywater Books, DREAMWalker Group, Gival Press, Harrington Park Press, InSightOut Books, Lodestar Quarterly, Suspect Thoughts Press, and Wildcat Press.
Once again, my thanks to everyone for their generosity and support of the New Orleans community.
I'll keep in touch and hope to get the first e-newsletter out by mid-October.
All the best,
Paul J. Willis"
Friday, September 30, 2005
Monday, September 05, 2005
Saturday, September 03, 2005
September Publishing Notes
The buzz: Regan Books will publish former New Jersey governor James McGreevey’s untitled book about how he wrestled with politics, family, and his sexuality. Touchstone will publish Disobedience, a first novel by Naomi Alderman, about the reunion of two women who were teenage lovers. Richard Labonté’s Books To Watch Out For reported that Lethe Press and the White Crane Institute, publisher of the White Crain Journal, will reprint 10 queer nonfiction classics, including Andrew Ramer’s Two Flutes Playing, Mark Thompson’s Gay Spirit, the collected works of Edward Carpenter, and previously unpublished writing by the late fairy poet and avant-garde filmmaker James Broughton. A libel lawsuit has been filed against the author, agent, and publisher of the bestselling memoir Running with Scissors. The suit—alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, emotional distress, and fraud—was filed in Middlesex Superior Court by six members of the Turcotte family of Northampton, MA, who maintain that they are the family of the eccentric psychiatrist with whom author Augusten Burroughs lived in his teens. Burroughs renamed them the “Finch” family in the 2002 book, which is being made into a movie due out next year. The family seeks “a public retraction of the book and a public statement that it is fiction and not memoir.” Lestat, the Elton John musical based on Anne Rice’s bestselling Vampire Chronicles, will have its world premiere December 17, 2005 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. The show will open on Broadway in March 2006. Julia Roberts will make her Broadway debut next spring in a revival of Richard Greenberg’s 1997 play Three Days of Rain. Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer prize-winning play, Seascape, will be revived on Broadway in November. Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries, will direct a screen version of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Kenneth Branagh will film a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a screenplay by Branagh and author/actor Stephen Fry. Neil Jordan’s movie version of the Patrick Gale’s novel Breakfast at Pluto will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. A film produced, directed, and starring Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), the best-known and most widely translated modern Japanese writer, has been found in a storeroom at Mishima’s home in Tokyo’s Ota Ward. Hiroaki Fujii, who co-produced the film in the 1960s with Mishima, said he found the negative of the film based on Mishima’s 1961 novel Yukoku (Patriotism). The film was made four years before Mishima’s death. Set to music by Wagner, the silent film follows an Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant who commits seppuku, or ritual suicide, rather than take part in a coup attempt. All copies of the movie were thought destroyed, at the request of Mishima’s widow. The film is expected to be released on DVD.
Kudos: Nominees for the newly initiated Quill awards, includes Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs in the memoir/biography category. Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition by Will Roscoe and Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions by Randy P. Conner with David Hatfield Sparks are finalists for the 2005 Ashé Journal Book Award. Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Open calls: David Olin Tullis, who published and edited The Great Lawn, a gay literary magazine which was published in the 1990s, has launched CreamDrops, a new art and literary journal for gay men. The first three issues are now available online. Last month, The Big Gay Read competition was launched in the UK to find Britain’s favorite gay novel. Coordinated by queerupnorth, commonword, Time to Read, and Manchester, Salford, and Blackpool Library services, the winner will be announced at a special event during the queerupnorth Festival in May 2006. Submissions for the favorite gay novel, which need not be one of the organization’s recommended books, must be in by February, and can be made through the Web site.
On and off the Shelves: In August, Bookselling This Week reported that Alamo Square Distributors (ASDI), a book distributor that specialized in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and sexual alternative market, would close at the end of the month. Shortly thereafter, Bert Herrmann, the founder of ASDI and publisher of Alamo Square Press, announced that he would be opening ASP Wholesale (a division of Alamo Square Press) and expected to be ready for business on September 15. Herrmann had sold ASDI four years ago to buy a retirement home in New Mexico. In an e-mail Hermann wrote, “These are hard times for wholesalers and also particularly hard times for smaller gay/lesbian/sexual alternative presses…. I have devoted much of my life to this industry and I have decided to step back to the plate and try one more time to keep our small presses alive.” In Sweden and Holland, libraries are “lending out people”—volunteers from outside of the mainstream, including gay men and lesbians, who sit in a cafeteria with library patrons, have a cup of coffee, and chat with them about their lives. These “living books” projects are meant to tear down prejudices about different religions, professions, and sexualities.
Up in Arms: In August, 365Gay.com reported that a judge ruled that the Pleasant Valley (Iowa) School Board acted appropriately when it told teachers they may not read to their classes a book with a gay character. The 4-3 vote last December, however, allows the book, The Misfits by James Howe, to be kept in school libraries, but out of the hands of small children. The Misfits is about four 12 year olds, best friends and the target of cruel name-calling who decide they aren’t going to take it anymore. One of the characters in the book is gay. The board’s action followed a complaint from a parent who said that if sexual orientation is part of the curriculum, then the Bible and the Ten Commandments should be read aloud, too. Two other parents appealed the board’s restriction to the state, saying the decision was motivated by “moral or religious reasons.” Iowa state administrative law judge Carol Greta ruled that the board “acted out of the legitimate educational concern of age-appropriateness” when it restricted access to the book. Greta said had the board voted to remove the book entirely from schools the decision would have faced a greater degree of scrutiny. Her ruling noted that “the local board has the authority to determine what curricular materials are appropriate for the different grade levels of students in the district. It did not interpret its statutory authority in an illogical or irrational way.” The ruling does not carry the weight of law and is considered a recommendation.
Passages: Al Carmines, who as assistant rector of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Theatre, helped create the experimental crucible that was the Judson’s Poets’ Theatre, and became one of the seminal forces of the Off-Off Broadway movement, died Aug. 11, 2005 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 69. Alvin Allison Carmines was born in Hampton, Virginia, on July 25, 1936. His father worked as a fishing trawler and his mother was a substitute schoolteacher. Raised as a Protestant, he soon developed a knack for performance, and won a music scholarship. However, he didn’t go into music, but studied theology at Swarthmore. He later enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary. Upon earning his bachelor of divinity, he was hired at Judson Memorial Church. From 1961, when Carmines was hired by Judson’s senior minister Howard Moody and charged with creating a theatre, until 1981, when the effects of an aneurysm forced him to resign, Carmines wrote about 80 musicals, operas, and oratorios. He often played his music in performance and was frequently called upon to act. Carmines wrote several musicals based on the Gertrude Stein’s work, including In Circles, which set the non-linear prose of Stein to ragtime, tango, waltz, opera, barbershop quartet, jazz and other musical styles. For the production, the composer wrote and performed a different opening number every night. The show won Mr. Carmines an Obie Award in 1968. He won other Obies for Home Movies and What Happened in 1964, for Promenade in 1965, and for Sustained Achievement in 1979. Other Stein works musicalized by Carmines include Dr. Faustus Lights The Lights, A Manoir, The Making of Americans, Listen To Me, and What Happened. Another favored theme was gay life. The title of one such Carmines show, 1973’s The Faggot (in which he also appeared as an actor), drew the ire of the gay population. Carmines wrote one musical for Broadway, W.C. Fields, which closed out of town. In 2003, Carmines was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Publishing Triangle and the Robert Chesley Foundation.
A memorial celebration of the life of gay activist pioneer and journalist Jack Nicols (1938-2005) will be held Sunday, Sept. 25 at 3:00 pm, at New York’s LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. Openly challenging psychiatry’s position at the time that homosexuality was a sickness, in 1961 Nichols and Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. In 1965, he led the first gay demonstration of a federal building—the White House—and organized the first East Coast ecumenical conference on homosexuality, later called the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual. In 1967, Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace in the first network (CBS) documentary on homosexuality. Nichols wrote four books, including Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (1975), and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (2004). He edited the first gay weekly newspaper, GAY, and as a journalist wrote the columns “The Homosexual Citizen” and “The Homosexual Anarchist.” During the last ten years of his life, he served as the editor for the widely-read online news-journal, GayToday. Speakers at the memorial will include gay pioneer activists Dick Leitsch and Randy Wicker; authors and journalists Charles Kaiser (Gay Metropolis), George Weinberg (Society and the Healthy Homosexual), David Carter (Stonewall), and Perry Brass (How To Survive Your Own Gay Life); as well as Shelbiana Clarke Rhein, sister of Nichol’s long-time companion Lige Clarke.
Kudos: Nominees for the newly initiated Quill awards, includes Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs in the memoir/biography category. Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition by Will Roscoe and Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions by Randy P. Conner with David Hatfield Sparks are finalists for the 2005 Ashé Journal Book Award. Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Open calls: David Olin Tullis, who published and edited The Great Lawn, a gay literary magazine which was published in the 1990s, has launched CreamDrops, a new art and literary journal for gay men. The first three issues are now available online. Last month, The Big Gay Read competition was launched in the UK to find Britain’s favorite gay novel. Coordinated by queerupnorth, commonword, Time to Read, and Manchester, Salford, and Blackpool Library services, the winner will be announced at a special event during the queerupnorth Festival in May 2006. Submissions for the favorite gay novel, which need not be one of the organization’s recommended books, must be in by February, and can be made through the Web site.
On and off the Shelves: In August, Bookselling This Week reported that Alamo Square Distributors (ASDI), a book distributor that specialized in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and sexual alternative market, would close at the end of the month. Shortly thereafter, Bert Herrmann, the founder of ASDI and publisher of Alamo Square Press, announced that he would be opening ASP Wholesale (a division of Alamo Square Press) and expected to be ready for business on September 15. Herrmann had sold ASDI four years ago to buy a retirement home in New Mexico. In an e-mail Hermann wrote, “These are hard times for wholesalers and also particularly hard times for smaller gay/lesbian/sexual alternative presses…. I have devoted much of my life to this industry and I have decided to step back to the plate and try one more time to keep our small presses alive.” In Sweden and Holland, libraries are “lending out people”—volunteers from outside of the mainstream, including gay men and lesbians, who sit in a cafeteria with library patrons, have a cup of coffee, and chat with them about their lives. These “living books” projects are meant to tear down prejudices about different religions, professions, and sexualities.
Up in Arms: In August, 365Gay.com reported that a judge ruled that the Pleasant Valley (Iowa) School Board acted appropriately when it told teachers they may not read to their classes a book with a gay character. The 4-3 vote last December, however, allows the book, The Misfits by James Howe, to be kept in school libraries, but out of the hands of small children. The Misfits is about four 12 year olds, best friends and the target of cruel name-calling who decide they aren’t going to take it anymore. One of the characters in the book is gay. The board’s action followed a complaint from a parent who said that if sexual orientation is part of the curriculum, then the Bible and the Ten Commandments should be read aloud, too. Two other parents appealed the board’s restriction to the state, saying the decision was motivated by “moral or religious reasons.” Iowa state administrative law judge Carol Greta ruled that the board “acted out of the legitimate educational concern of age-appropriateness” when it restricted access to the book. Greta said had the board voted to remove the book entirely from schools the decision would have faced a greater degree of scrutiny. Her ruling noted that “the local board has the authority to determine what curricular materials are appropriate for the different grade levels of students in the district. It did not interpret its statutory authority in an illogical or irrational way.” The ruling does not carry the weight of law and is considered a recommendation.
Passages: Al Carmines, who as assistant rector of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Theatre, helped create the experimental crucible that was the Judson’s Poets’ Theatre, and became one of the seminal forces of the Off-Off Broadway movement, died Aug. 11, 2005 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 69. Alvin Allison Carmines was born in Hampton, Virginia, on July 25, 1936. His father worked as a fishing trawler and his mother was a substitute schoolteacher. Raised as a Protestant, he soon developed a knack for performance, and won a music scholarship. However, he didn’t go into music, but studied theology at Swarthmore. He later enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary. Upon earning his bachelor of divinity, he was hired at Judson Memorial Church. From 1961, when Carmines was hired by Judson’s senior minister Howard Moody and charged with creating a theatre, until 1981, when the effects of an aneurysm forced him to resign, Carmines wrote about 80 musicals, operas, and oratorios. He often played his music in performance and was frequently called upon to act. Carmines wrote several musicals based on the Gertrude Stein’s work, including In Circles, which set the non-linear prose of Stein to ragtime, tango, waltz, opera, barbershop quartet, jazz and other musical styles. For the production, the composer wrote and performed a different opening number every night. The show won Mr. Carmines an Obie Award in 1968. He won other Obies for Home Movies and What Happened in 1964, for Promenade in 1965, and for Sustained Achievement in 1979. Other Stein works musicalized by Carmines include Dr. Faustus Lights The Lights, A Manoir, The Making of Americans, Listen To Me, and What Happened. Another favored theme was gay life. The title of one such Carmines show, 1973’s The Faggot (in which he also appeared as an actor), drew the ire of the gay population. Carmines wrote one musical for Broadway, W.C. Fields, which closed out of town. In 2003, Carmines was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Publishing Triangle and the Robert Chesley Foundation.
A memorial celebration of the life of gay activist pioneer and journalist Jack Nicols (1938-2005) will be held Sunday, Sept. 25 at 3:00 pm, at New York’s LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. Openly challenging psychiatry’s position at the time that homosexuality was a sickness, in 1961 Nichols and Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. In 1965, he led the first gay demonstration of a federal building—the White House—and organized the first East Coast ecumenical conference on homosexuality, later called the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual. In 1967, Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace in the first network (CBS) documentary on homosexuality. Nichols wrote four books, including Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (1975), and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (2004). He edited the first gay weekly newspaper, GAY, and as a journalist wrote the columns “The Homosexual Citizen” and “The Homosexual Anarchist.” During the last ten years of his life, he served as the editor for the widely-read online news-journal, GayToday. Speakers at the memorial will include gay pioneer activists Dick Leitsch and Randy Wicker; authors and journalists Charles Kaiser (Gay Metropolis), George Weinberg (Society and the Healthy Homosexual), David Carter (Stonewall), and Perry Brass (How To Survive Your Own Gay Life); as well as Shelbiana Clarke Rhein, sister of Nichol’s long-time companion Lige Clarke.
Monday, August 01, 2005
August Publishing Notes
The buzz: Harpercollins will publish Scott Heim’s new novel, We Disappear, about a meth-addict caring for his ill mother in Kansas. Ballantine will publish three new Rita Mae Brown’s novels: Dueling Grounds, a historical novel in which six old-money Virginia families in the mid-nineteenth century engage in a dangerous contest to see whose eldest son lives longest, and the next two "Sister Jane" foxhunting novels. Joel Defner, who hit it big with Gay Haiku, will publish Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever with Broadway Books. Rose of No Man’s Land, Michelle Tea’s coming of age story about a lonely teenager whose life shifts into overdrive when she befriends a misfit named Rose, will be published by MacAdam/Cage.
Kudos: Lesbian poet May Swenson’s portrait will soon hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Swenson was born in Utah in 1913 and died in 1989 in Delaware at the age of 76 and published 11 volumes of poetry. The 1960 portrait, in pastels and on paper, is by gay artist Beauford Delaney, a friend of Swenson’s. The National Portrait Gallery brought the portrait from the poet’s literary estate in May. Poet Eloise Klein Healey received Antioch University’s Horace Mann Award. Mann was the first president of the university, founded in 1852. Healey is the founding chair of Antioch’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Her most recent collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lord/Publishing Triangle Poetry Award.
Open calls: Hand.tooth.nail, a new literary e-zine, is now accepting submissions of poetry, prose and fiction. Kirkus Reviews is launching the annual Virginia Kirkus Literary Award for the best unpublished first novel or short story collection. Deadline is November 1, 2005 and the submission fee is $150. The Rauxa Prize carries an award of $1000 given annual to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality. Nominations are due by September 15, 2005
.
On and off the Shelves: A new gay bookstore has opened in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC. G Books, 1520 U Street, NW, sells trade used and new gay books, magazines, movies, and music. John David Hinkle has opened gay-friendly John David’s Lightly Used Books in Lansing, Michigan. After many years and a lot of different jobs in Chicago (including writing a column for Gay Chicago Magazine), Hinkle plans to have the store serve as a meeting place for local groups and as a "no-hate zone." "If this town can support four gay bars, they can support me," Hinkle told a reporter for the Lansing State Journal. Seattle’s Beyond the Closet closed its doors on July 28, 2005. Owner Ron Whiteaker told the Seattle Gay News that declining sales, Internet discounting, and "armchair buying" contributed to the store’s closing after 17 years. The Women’s Review of Books, which ceased publication last December, will resume publication in January 2006. The magazine will return as a bi-monthly and with the same editor, Amy Hoffman. Wellesley will co-sponsor the publication along with Old City Publishing.
Up in Arms: In July, the Anderson County School Board of Tennessee decided Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, was too off-color for 13-year-olds enrolled in a summer reading course. Parents voiced concerns to board members and school officials about graphic passages dealing with rape and incest and didn’t want their kids in the class if and when the book was discussed. Walker’s novel was suggested by the teacher as summer reading to coincide with student interest in the Michael Jackson trial. The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) reported in July that an application was filed to ban the theatrical release of the film version of Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin due to the pedophilia story line. Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the movie a R18+ rating, describing the film as "a serious and legitimate exploration of a disturbing and confronting theme."
Passages: British novelist and screenwriter Gavin Lambert died July 17, 2005, of pulmonary fibrosis in Los Angeles. He was 80 years old. Lambert works include Inside Daisy Clover (novel and screenplay), The Slide Area, GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood, On Cukor, Norma Shearer: A Life, and Natalie Wood, A Life in Seven Takes. Born in Sussex, England, on July 23, 1924, Lambert attended Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became friends with aspiring filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, with whom he co-founded and co-edited the film journal Sequence in 1947. From 1949 to 1955, Lambert edited the film journal Sight and Sound before writing his first film Another Sky, which he also directed. In 1961, Lambert wrote the screen adaptation, along with Jan Read, of Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which starred Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty. He penned another Williams adaptation in 1989, the TV version of Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon. Lambert became a U.S. citizen in 1964 and was twice nominated for awards by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America: for the 1960 screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, which he wrote with T.E.B. Clarke, and 1977's adaptation of the I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which he wrote with Lewis John Carlino.
Kudos: Lesbian poet May Swenson’s portrait will soon hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Swenson was born in Utah in 1913 and died in 1989 in Delaware at the age of 76 and published 11 volumes of poetry. The 1960 portrait, in pastels and on paper, is by gay artist Beauford Delaney, a friend of Swenson’s. The National Portrait Gallery brought the portrait from the poet’s literary estate in May. Poet Eloise Klein Healey received Antioch University’s Horace Mann Award. Mann was the first president of the university, founded in 1852. Healey is the founding chair of Antioch’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Her most recent collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lord/Publishing Triangle Poetry Award.
Open calls: Hand.tooth.nail, a new literary e-zine, is now accepting submissions of poetry, prose and fiction. Kirkus Reviews is launching the annual Virginia Kirkus Literary Award for the best unpublished first novel or short story collection. Deadline is November 1, 2005 and the submission fee is $150. The Rauxa Prize carries an award of $1000 given annual to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality. Nominations are due by September 15, 2005
.
On and off the Shelves: A new gay bookstore has opened in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC. G Books, 1520 U Street, NW, sells trade used and new gay books, magazines, movies, and music. John David Hinkle has opened gay-friendly John David’s Lightly Used Books in Lansing, Michigan. After many years and a lot of different jobs in Chicago (including writing a column for Gay Chicago Magazine), Hinkle plans to have the store serve as a meeting place for local groups and as a "no-hate zone." "If this town can support four gay bars, they can support me," Hinkle told a reporter for the Lansing State Journal. Seattle’s Beyond the Closet closed its doors on July 28, 2005. Owner Ron Whiteaker told the Seattle Gay News that declining sales, Internet discounting, and "armchair buying" contributed to the store’s closing after 17 years. The Women’s Review of Books, which ceased publication last December, will resume publication in January 2006. The magazine will return as a bi-monthly and with the same editor, Amy Hoffman. Wellesley will co-sponsor the publication along with Old City Publishing.
Up in Arms: In July, the Anderson County School Board of Tennessee decided Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, was too off-color for 13-year-olds enrolled in a summer reading course. Parents voiced concerns to board members and school officials about graphic passages dealing with rape and incest and didn’t want their kids in the class if and when the book was discussed. Walker’s novel was suggested by the teacher as summer reading to coincide with student interest in the Michael Jackson trial. The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) reported in July that an application was filed to ban the theatrical release of the film version of Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin due to the pedophilia story line. Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the movie a R18+ rating, describing the film as "a serious and legitimate exploration of a disturbing and confronting theme."
Passages: British novelist and screenwriter Gavin Lambert died July 17, 2005, of pulmonary fibrosis in Los Angeles. He was 80 years old. Lambert works include Inside Daisy Clover (novel and screenplay), The Slide Area, GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood, On Cukor, Norma Shearer: A Life, and Natalie Wood, A Life in Seven Takes. Born in Sussex, England, on July 23, 1924, Lambert attended Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became friends with aspiring filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, with whom he co-founded and co-edited the film journal Sequence in 1947. From 1949 to 1955, Lambert edited the film journal Sight and Sound before writing his first film Another Sky, which he also directed. In 1961, Lambert wrote the screen adaptation, along with Jan Read, of Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which starred Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty. He penned another Williams adaptation in 1989, the TV version of Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon. Lambert became a U.S. citizen in 1964 and was twice nominated for awards by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America: for the 1960 screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, which he wrote with T.E.B. Clarke, and 1977's adaptation of the I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which he wrote with Lewis John Carlino.
Monday, July 04, 2005
July Publishing Notes
The buzz: In a recent interview with Leslie Robinson in Bay Windows, retired Colonel Grethe Cammermeyer (Serving in Silence) mentioned she is at work on a new book, tentatively titled Living in Ambiguity, tackling "how we challenge people to think outside their familiar biases." Associated Press reported that author Terry McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) has filed for divorce after learning her husband was gay and believing that he had married her only to get his U.S. citizenship. Pages magazine reported that author Michael Cunningham’s next project is a Universal Pictures screenplay for Julia Roberts, based on Lolly Winston’s novel Good Grief, about how a young woman copes after the death of her husband. Actor and author Rupert Everett will be the voice of the Fox in the upcoming big screen adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Author and actor Alan Cumming will join the Showtime series The L Word during its third season. Variety reported that the start date of the movie version of Hairspray has been delayed; the film’s producers are now wooing Rob Marshall (Chicago) as director. Eddie Murphy, Beyonce Knowles, and Jamie Foxx will star in the big screen version of Dreamgirls, directed by Bill Condon. Doug Wright, the Tony-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife, is the librettist for the new musical Grey Gardens, adapted from the documentary about Edith and Edie Bouvier. The musical will premiere during Playwrights Horizon’s 2005-2006 season in Manhattan, along with Miss Witherspoon by Christopher Durang, Pen by David Marshall Grant, and Sarah Schulman’s Manic Flight Reaction. Jon Marans, a Pulitzer-prize-winning finalist for Old Wicked Songs, debuted a new play titled The Tempermentals about Mattachine founder Harry Hay at the recent Moral Values Festival in New York. Chamberlain Bros. will publish Saturday Night at the Baths by Steve Ostrow. Ostrow, the founder of the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, helped repeal New York’s laws against homosexuality and turned a gay bathhouse into one of the hot nightspots of the ‘70s that was instrumental in the careers of Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, and a host of others. Cleis Press co-publisher Felice Newman is now syndicating a biweekly lesbian sex column titled "Whole Lesbian Sex" available in both PG-13 and X-rated versions.
More buzz on Lambda: Eleanor Brown reported in the June issue of Press Pass Q that the James White Review was close to finding a new home. The quarterly gay men’s literary magazine, under the auspices of the Lambda Literary Foundation, recently suspended publication. The JWR began in the summer of 1984 and was taken over by LLF in 1998.
Kudos: Sugar Rush, Julie Burchill’s controversial about schoolgirls discovering lesbian love, was shortlisted for a for the British Booktrust Teenage Prize. Robert Taylor’s novel, Whose Eye Is on Which Sparrow? won the 2005 Independent Publishers Book Award for the best book of the year with a gay or lesbian theme, including both fiction and nonfiction.
Open calls: Project QueerLit #2 has begun, and is open to all first-time novelists with queer, bent, or outsider worldview content. Novel submissions will be accepted from September 1-December 31, 2005. Winners will be announced in December 31, 2006. Visit www.projectqueerlit.com for more details. The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants for 2005 will be for Playwrighting. All works must present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner and be based on, or directly inspired by, a historic person, culture, work of art, or event. All works (Drama or Comedy or Musical) submitted must be unpublished, original, and in English. Adaptations or translations of other works are not acceptable. Plays may be full-length, a long one-act, or an evening-long collection of related one-acts. All submissions must be postmarked by midnight November 30, 2005. All works selected by the judges will be announced in Spring 2006. Visit www.aabbfoundation.org for more details.
Love, Uncovered: An unpublished love poem written 2,600 years ago by the Greek poet Sappho, the "10th muse," debuted in the Times Literary Supplement in June 2005. The poem was discovered in 2004. The 12-line poem, only the fourth to have been recovered, was rediscovered after researchers at Germany’s Cologne University identified a papyrus once wrapped around an Egyptian mummy as part of a third century B.C. roll containing poems by Sappho. They noticed that some of the verse fragments on the crumbling Cologne material matched parts of lines already identified as Sappho’s on a papyrus discovered in 1922. By combining the two they were able to reconstruct the original, adding likely missing words in the gaps that remained. In the newly published verses, originally sung to music, Sappho laments the passing of time as she compares the youthful bodies of dancing girls to her own weak knees and white hair. The first four lines of the translated verses read: "You for the fragrant-bosomed Muses’ lovely gifts,/Be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:/But my once tender body old age now/Has seized; my hair’s turned white instead of dark."
On the Shelves: A new GLBT bookstore opened in June in Omaha, Nebraska. Books, magazines, gourmet coffee, music, authors, artists, and speakers are on the menu at The Reading Grounds, 3928 Farnam Street. The Taipei Times reported that Gin Gin’s, the GLBT bookstore in Taipei, celebrated Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in June by moving to a new, larger location. The bookstore was recently found guilty of selling "indecent material." "These setbacks, however, only reinforced the need to keep the bookstore open for the gay community," owner Lai Jeng-jer told a reporter from the newspaper. Gin Gin’s has been in business since January 1999.
Passages: Jean O’Leary, a Democratic activist and leader of the early lesbian feminist movement, died June 5, 2005, at the age of 57 in San Clemente, CA. The cause was lung cancer. Born in Kingston, NY in 1948, O’Leary entered a convent as a teenager and her story was a much-discussed chapter in the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. She left and joined the Gay Activists Alliance shortly after the Stonewall riots and soon helped branched off to help found the Lesbian Feminist Liberation. In 1974, O’Leary joined Bruce Voeller at the National Gay Task Force and became co-executive director. O’Leary organized the first White House meeting on sexual orientation, a three-hour session between leaders and Carter aide Midge Constanze in 1977. In 1988, O’Leary, along with Rob Eichberg, created National Coming Out Day. She is survived by her partner, Lisa Phelps, and two children.
More buzz on Lambda: Eleanor Brown reported in the June issue of Press Pass Q that the James White Review was close to finding a new home. The quarterly gay men’s literary magazine, under the auspices of the Lambda Literary Foundation, recently suspended publication. The JWR began in the summer of 1984 and was taken over by LLF in 1998.
Kudos: Sugar Rush, Julie Burchill’s controversial about schoolgirls discovering lesbian love, was shortlisted for a for the British Booktrust Teenage Prize. Robert Taylor’s novel, Whose Eye Is on Which Sparrow? won the 2005 Independent Publishers Book Award for the best book of the year with a gay or lesbian theme, including both fiction and nonfiction.
Open calls: Project QueerLit #2 has begun, and is open to all first-time novelists with queer, bent, or outsider worldview content. Novel submissions will be accepted from September 1-December 31, 2005. Winners will be announced in December 31, 2006. Visit www.projectqueerlit.com for more details. The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants for 2005 will be for Playwrighting. All works must present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner and be based on, or directly inspired by, a historic person, culture, work of art, or event. All works (Drama or Comedy or Musical) submitted must be unpublished, original, and in English. Adaptations or translations of other works are not acceptable. Plays may be full-length, a long one-act, or an evening-long collection of related one-acts. All submissions must be postmarked by midnight November 30, 2005. All works selected by the judges will be announced in Spring 2006. Visit www.aabbfoundation.org for more details.
Love, Uncovered: An unpublished love poem written 2,600 years ago by the Greek poet Sappho, the "10th muse," debuted in the Times Literary Supplement in June 2005. The poem was discovered in 2004. The 12-line poem, only the fourth to have been recovered, was rediscovered after researchers at Germany’s Cologne University identified a papyrus once wrapped around an Egyptian mummy as part of a third century B.C. roll containing poems by Sappho. They noticed that some of the verse fragments on the crumbling Cologne material matched parts of lines already identified as Sappho’s on a papyrus discovered in 1922. By combining the two they were able to reconstruct the original, adding likely missing words in the gaps that remained. In the newly published verses, originally sung to music, Sappho laments the passing of time as she compares the youthful bodies of dancing girls to her own weak knees and white hair. The first four lines of the translated verses read: "You for the fragrant-bosomed Muses’ lovely gifts,/Be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:/But my once tender body old age now/Has seized; my hair’s turned white instead of dark."
On the Shelves: A new GLBT bookstore opened in June in Omaha, Nebraska. Books, magazines, gourmet coffee, music, authors, artists, and speakers are on the menu at The Reading Grounds, 3928 Farnam Street. The Taipei Times reported that Gin Gin’s, the GLBT bookstore in Taipei, celebrated Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in June by moving to a new, larger location. The bookstore was recently found guilty of selling "indecent material." "These setbacks, however, only reinforced the need to keep the bookstore open for the gay community," owner Lai Jeng-jer told a reporter from the newspaper. Gin Gin’s has been in business since January 1999.
Passages: Jean O’Leary, a Democratic activist and leader of the early lesbian feminist movement, died June 5, 2005, at the age of 57 in San Clemente, CA. The cause was lung cancer. Born in Kingston, NY in 1948, O’Leary entered a convent as a teenager and her story was a much-discussed chapter in the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. She left and joined the Gay Activists Alliance shortly after the Stonewall riots and soon helped branched off to help found the Lesbian Feminist Liberation. In 1974, O’Leary joined Bruce Voeller at the National Gay Task Force and became co-executive director. O’Leary organized the first White House meeting on sexual orientation, a three-hour session between leaders and Carter aide Midge Constanze in 1977. In 1988, O’Leary, along with Rob Eichberg, created National Coming Out Day. She is survived by her partner, Lisa Phelps, and two children.
Friday, June 17, 2005
More Details Emerge
With articles today in Bookselling this Week and The New York Blade, a clearer picture is emerging on the potential restructuring of the Lambda Literary Foundation. Nomi Schwartz reported in BTW that the changes were due to "the pending sale of the building housing [the Foundation] offices, combined with the consistently precarious financial state of the Foundation throughout its history," according to a statement from the Foundation’s board. While the Lambda Book Report and the James White Review will suspend publication, the Board intends to continue its author reading series and the Lambda Literary Awards. A more detailed story in The Blade by Rhonda Smith reveals Jim Marks served as executive director of the Foundation since May 1996 except for an 18 month period from April 2001 to December 2002. Although the changes are precipitated by the Foundation’s finances, Marks was quoted in the article as saying that 2005 revenue was up about 25 percent for the first five months of the year. Marks told Smith that the organization is “a little bit over a $200,000-a-year business.” The Blade also reported that it is unclear whether the Lambda Literary Foundation’s headquarters will continue to be based in Washington, D.C.
On a personal note, I've always had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Jim Marks because of the gargantuan tasks he has faced keeping the Foundation running and consider him a good friend and a huge supporter of gay literature at a time when those supporters seem to be diminishing. I've also enjoyed being a part of the LBR and working with Jonathan Harper and Lisa Moore and I look forward to working with all of them in possible future venues.
On a personal note, I've always had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Jim Marks because of the gargantuan tasks he has faced keeping the Foundation running and consider him a good friend and a huge supporter of gay literature at a time when those supporters seem to be diminishing. I've also enjoyed being a part of the LBR and working with Jonathan Harper and Lisa Moore and I look forward to working with all of them in possible future venues.
Friday, June 10, 2005
Stay Tuned
Things seem to be rapidly changing at the Lambda Literary Foundation. On Tuesday of this week, the Washington D.C. staff of the Lambda Book Report was dismissed. I heard of this on Wednesday, when one of the staff members called me to ask if I would provide a job recommendation. (And which I promised that, of course, I would do whatever I could.) It seems that the future of the LBR, James White Review, and LLF-sponsored writers conference may be suspended, although the Foundation may continue the Lambda Literary Awards. On Thursday, I was contacted by a remaining board member of the Lambda Literary Foundation to clarify what had transpired at the offices regarding the Foundation's Executive Director Jim Marks. On Friday, I received the following e-mail from the Foundation. Stay tuned for further developments.
"Jim Marks tendered his resignation as Executive Director to take effect on July 1, 2005. The Board acknowledges that Jim has been key--indeed, vital--in the work of theorganization and extends its heartfelt and profound appreciation to Jim for his dedication and hard work over the years. We wish every good fortune to Jim in his future pursuits. Remaining Board Members Jim Duggins, Katherine V. Forrest, Karla Jay, and Don Weise of the Lambda LiteraryFoundation's Board of Trustees are evaluating the impact of this resignation and factoring it into other structural plans discussed at the June 3, 2005 Board meeting. It is expected that other announcements will be forthcoming."
"Jim Marks tendered his resignation as Executive Director to take effect on July 1, 2005. The Board acknowledges that Jim has been key--indeed, vital--in the work of theorganization and extends its heartfelt and profound appreciation to Jim for his dedication and hard work over the years. We wish every good fortune to Jim in his future pursuits. Remaining Board Members Jim Duggins, Katherine V. Forrest, Karla Jay, and Don Weise of the Lambda LiteraryFoundation's Board of Trustees are evaluating the impact of this resignation and factoring it into other structural plans discussed at the June 3, 2005 Board meeting. It is expected that other announcements will be forthcoming."
Friday, June 03, 2005
Last Night in New York City: The Lambda Literary Awards
Last night in New York City at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies ofthe City Univesity of New York on Fifth Avenue, the Lambda Literary Foundation presented their annual awards for best books. Lea DeLaria did a magnificent job hosting the awards and the Lambda production team headed by Ben Hodges did a terrific job of making it a special evening for all involved.
Gay Men's Debut Fiction
Clay's Way by Blair Mastbaum, Alyson Publications
Gay Men's Fiction
The Master by Colm Toibin, Scribner
Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crybaby Butch by Judith Frank, Firebrand Books
Lesbian Fiction
A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo, Houghton Mifflin
Lesbian Poetry
Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch, Gival Press
Gay Men's Poetry
Written in Water by Luis Cernuda, City Lights Publishers
Lesbian Mystery
Hancock Park by Katherine V. Forrest, Berkley Prime Crime
Gay Men's Mystery
Flight of Aquavit by Anthony Bidulka, Insomniac Press
Fiction Anthology
Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction edited by Donald Weise, Carroll & Graff
Nonfiction Anthology
I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage edited by Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, Suspect Thoughts Press
Memoir/Autobiography
Name All the Animals by Alison Smith, Scribner
Biography
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux, W.W. Norton
Erotica
Best Gay Erotica 2005 edited by Richard Labonte, Cleis Press
Romance
Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger, HarperCollins
Children's/Young Adult
So Hard to Say by Alex Sanchez, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Humor
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris, Little, Brown
Religion/Spirituality
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love by Will Roscoe, Suspect Thoughts Press
Drama/Theater
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Faber and Faber
Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Ordinary by Jim Grimsley, Tor
Transgender/GenderQueer
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag
Visual Arts/Photography
At Ease: Navy Men of World War II by Evan Bachner, Harry Abrams
LGBT Studies
For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relations in a Greek Provincial Town by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Routledge
The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation winners for Short Fiction were presented to Quiara Alegria Hudes, Dennis Jordan, and C. Kevin Smith.
The Independent LGBT Press Award was presented to Bella Books.
The Editor’s Choice Award was presented to Richard Canning for Hear Us Out (Columbia University Press).
Gay Men's Debut Fiction
Clay's Way by Blair Mastbaum, Alyson Publications
Gay Men's Fiction
The Master by Colm Toibin, Scribner
Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crybaby Butch by Judith Frank, Firebrand Books
Lesbian Fiction
A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo, Houghton Mifflin
Lesbian Poetry
Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch, Gival Press
Gay Men's Poetry
Written in Water by Luis Cernuda, City Lights Publishers
Lesbian Mystery
Hancock Park by Katherine V. Forrest, Berkley Prime Crime
Gay Men's Mystery
Flight of Aquavit by Anthony Bidulka, Insomniac Press
Fiction Anthology
Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction edited by Donald Weise, Carroll & Graff
Nonfiction Anthology
I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage edited by Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, Suspect Thoughts Press
Memoir/Autobiography
Name All the Animals by Alison Smith, Scribner
Biography
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux, W.W. Norton
Erotica
Best Gay Erotica 2005 edited by Richard Labonte, Cleis Press
Romance
Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger, HarperCollins
Children's/Young Adult
So Hard to Say by Alex Sanchez, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Humor
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris, Little, Brown
Religion/Spirituality
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love by Will Roscoe, Suspect Thoughts Press
Drama/Theater
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Faber and Faber
Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Ordinary by Jim Grimsley, Tor
Transgender/GenderQueer
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag
Visual Arts/Photography
At Ease: Navy Men of World War II by Evan Bachner, Harry Abrams
LGBT Studies
For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relations in a Greek Provincial Town by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Routledge
The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation winners for Short Fiction were presented to Quiara Alegria Hudes, Dennis Jordan, and C. Kevin Smith.
The Independent LGBT Press Award was presented to Bella Books.
The Editor’s Choice Award was presented to Richard Canning for Hear Us Out (Columbia University Press).
Thursday, June 02, 2005
June Publishing Notes
The buzz: The London Daily Mail reported that Time Warner has acquired the rights to Rupert Everett’s memoirs for $1.8 million, which reportedly includes not only details of his Hollywood career but his stint as a male prostitute. Anne Rice’s next book will not be about vampires, but Jesus. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, due out in November from Random House, will tell the story of Jesus in his own words. Universal and Red Wagon have optioned Augusten Burrough’s forthcoming memoir of his reconciliation with his abusive father. Warner Brothers has optioned Mike Albo’s novel The Underminer. Brian Singer will direct the film version of Randy Shilt’s book about San Francisco politician-activist Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street. Lily Tomlin will be part of the all-star cast of Robert Altman’s movie of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mirren, and Dennis Hopper will star in the film adaptation of Susan Sontag’s novel In America. MTV Networks’ forthcoming gay channel Logo and LPI Media (Publisher of Advocate and Out magazines) have formed a partnership to created cobranded television specials and an online news service. The first special is expected to air in the late fall of 2005. CBS has picked up Flesh & Blood, a new sitcom from writer Joe Keenan. Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler will star. Variety reported that Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe is being turned into a drama headed for the Broadway stage.
Kudos: Andrew Sean Greer, the 34-year-old author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, given annually to an emerging author. Tony Kushner was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May. The Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans inducted Patrick Califia, Jim Grimsley, Ellen Hart, and Carol Seajay into their Hall of Fame. Ellen DeGeneres won her second consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show and her first as Outstanding Talk Show Host. She has also signed to do six more seasons. Stockard Channing won for Outstanding Performance in a Family Special for Jack, about TV adaptation of A.M. Home’s novel about a father who comes out of the closet. Actress Cherry Jones was cited with an Obie Award for her performance in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt. Winners for the Arch and Bruce Foundation short fiction competition are: First Prize: Quiara Alegria Hudes of Pennsylvania for "Stargazers," Dennis Jordan of New York City for "Sweet Jermone," and C. Kevin Smith of Big Sur, California for "Not the Last of the Mohicans." Second Prize went to Joel A. Nichols of Philadelphia for "Angels on Water" and Wendell Ricketts of San Francisco for "Speedos and a Sweatshirt." Third Prize honors went to Donna Barr of Bremerton, Washington for "A Good Example," Carolyn Gage of Portland, Maine for "Entr’acte," Veronica Holtz of Philadelphia for "A Respectful Distance," Neil Ellis Orts of Houston, Texas for "Men Dancing," and Donald Yonker of New York City for "Everything I Know I Learned from Musical Comedy." Edmund White was named one of the Scholars & Writers at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
Kerouac, past and present: A bobble-head doll of author Jack Kerouac, created as a promotion by the minor-league team, the Lowell Spinners, joined the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame in May. It is believed to be the first literary figure so honored. The bobble-head was unveiled at the ball game of August 21, 2003 to honor the Lowell-native and helped raised more than $10,000 for Jack Kerouac Scholarships. Also recently unearthed from a New Jersey warehouse was Beat Generation, a unpublished play by Kerouac. The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fueled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter eager. Kerouac’s biographer Gerald Nicosia reported that the play was written in one day after the author had returned to his home in Florida following the publication of On The Road. An off-Broadway producer named Leo Gavin had expressed interest in a play. The play was never published or performed, but the third act became the basis for a film, Pull My Daisy, starring poet Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, said the play had been submitted to several producers but was turned down. Kerouac also sent the play to Marlon Brando. Brando never responded and the two men only met once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actor’s Studio. After 15 minutes of the class, Kerouac asked, "Don’t they give you any drinks in this place?" Spotting Brando, he invited him for a drink. Brando refused. The play will be published in October by Thunders Mouth Press and a staged reading is scheduled for New York in January 2006. Mr. Nicosia told a reporter from the London Guardian that it was not unusual for work by Kerouac to remain unpublished. "A lot of Jack’s greatest works were never published in his lifetime. The Kerouac estate has been releasing stuff from the archives over the last 10 years... He had a brief moment in the sun, but the right wing launched a major attack on him. They saw him as a major threat to society. They really succeeded in knocking him down."
Attacks Continue: The New York Times reported in an early June 2005 article that according to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books by having them removed from shelves or reading lists, that 547 books were challenged in 2004, up from 458 in 2003. Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she told the Times. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected. And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year." The Oklahoma house approved a $6.68 million budget for state libraries in May and vowed to study local library policies on the placement of gay themed books on children’s shelves. Sally Kearn, a member of the house subcommittee that funds the libraries, had threatened to withhold extra funding for libraries over the issue o gay-themed books. Earlier in the month, the Oklahoma house voted overwhelmingly to recommend creating adult-only sections in all public libraries to shield children from gay-themed books. In late April, police in the Boston suburb of Lexington, MA arrested a father after he refused to leave his six-year-old son’s elementary school over a book that featured a gay family. The father spent the night in jail and was freed after being ordered off school property. Also in late April, Chris Crain, editorial director of the Window media newspaper chain which operates the Washington Blade and Southern Voice, among other newspapers, was beaten by seven men in Amsterdam while he was walking hand-in-hand with his boyfriend early one morning. "I hope our gay friends in Holland realize that it’s a bit too soon to declare victory and go home, now that they’ve won their legal battles," Crain wrote in a subsequent editorial in his newspapers. "Winning the hearts and minds of the people will be a much more challenging task."
Off the Shelves: Cuttyhunk, Boston’s 12-year old gay bookstore, will close in late summer of 2005. Formerly known as We Think the World of You, owner Paul Rehme will close the store to "seek new challenges, including the creation of an exciting new real estate company," as relayed on the bookstore’s Web site. The 18 year-old Tomes & Treasures, the Tampa gay bookstore, gift shop, and coffee house located for the last eight years at its current S. Howard Avenue location, closed in June 2005. Owner Bill Kanouff told the St. Petersburg Times that large bookstore chains, the Internet, and the "mainstreaming of gay culture" helped bring about the store’s demise.
Passages: Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who partnered with director James Ivory to create the award-winning adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View, Maurice, and Howards End, died May 25, 2005 in London. He was 68. Born in 1936 in what was then Bombay, Mr. Merchant moved to New York in 1958 and earned a master’s in business administration at New York University. His professional partnership with Mr. Ivory continued for 44-years. Mr. Ivory survives him, as do four sisters: Saherbanu Kabadia and Ruksana Khan, both of Mumbai; Sahida Retiwala of Bergenfield, N.J.; and Rashida Bootwala of Pune, India.
Activist and author Jack Nichols died on May 2, 2005, in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 67. The cause was complications of cancer. Nichols was born in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 1938, and came out as gay to his parents as a teenager. Along with Frank Kameny, Nichols founded the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy group, in Washington in 1961. In 1967, Mr. Nichols became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television when he appeared in the CBS documentary "’The Homosexuals." For years Nichols was one of the activists who campaigned to have the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1969, after moving to New York, Mr. Nichols founded Gay, the first gay weekly newspaper in the United States, with his companion, Lige Clarke (who died in 1975). Until recently, Nichols also edited the online publication GayToday.com. Among Mr. Nichols’s books are Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin, 1975); The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus, 1996); and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (Harrington Park Press, 2004), which was nominated for a 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Memoir/Autobiography category.
Kudos: Andrew Sean Greer, the 34-year-old author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, given annually to an emerging author. Tony Kushner was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May. The Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans inducted Patrick Califia, Jim Grimsley, Ellen Hart, and Carol Seajay into their Hall of Fame. Ellen DeGeneres won her second consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show and her first as Outstanding Talk Show Host. She has also signed to do six more seasons. Stockard Channing won for Outstanding Performance in a Family Special for Jack, about TV adaptation of A.M. Home’s novel about a father who comes out of the closet. Actress Cherry Jones was cited with an Obie Award for her performance in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt. Winners for the Arch and Bruce Foundation short fiction competition are: First Prize: Quiara Alegria Hudes of Pennsylvania for "Stargazers," Dennis Jordan of New York City for "Sweet Jermone," and C. Kevin Smith of Big Sur, California for "Not the Last of the Mohicans." Second Prize went to Joel A. Nichols of Philadelphia for "Angels on Water" and Wendell Ricketts of San Francisco for "Speedos and a Sweatshirt." Third Prize honors went to Donna Barr of Bremerton, Washington for "A Good Example," Carolyn Gage of Portland, Maine for "Entr’acte," Veronica Holtz of Philadelphia for "A Respectful Distance," Neil Ellis Orts of Houston, Texas for "Men Dancing," and Donald Yonker of New York City for "Everything I Know I Learned from Musical Comedy." Edmund White was named one of the Scholars & Writers at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
Kerouac, past and present: A bobble-head doll of author Jack Kerouac, created as a promotion by the minor-league team, the Lowell Spinners, joined the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame in May. It is believed to be the first literary figure so honored. The bobble-head was unveiled at the ball game of August 21, 2003 to honor the Lowell-native and helped raised more than $10,000 for Jack Kerouac Scholarships. Also recently unearthed from a New Jersey warehouse was Beat Generation, a unpublished play by Kerouac. The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fueled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter eager. Kerouac’s biographer Gerald Nicosia reported that the play was written in one day after the author had returned to his home in Florida following the publication of On The Road. An off-Broadway producer named Leo Gavin had expressed interest in a play. The play was never published or performed, but the third act became the basis for a film, Pull My Daisy, starring poet Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, said the play had been submitted to several producers but was turned down. Kerouac also sent the play to Marlon Brando. Brando never responded and the two men only met once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actor’s Studio. After 15 minutes of the class, Kerouac asked, "Don’t they give you any drinks in this place?" Spotting Brando, he invited him for a drink. Brando refused. The play will be published in October by Thunders Mouth Press and a staged reading is scheduled for New York in January 2006. Mr. Nicosia told a reporter from the London Guardian that it was not unusual for work by Kerouac to remain unpublished. "A lot of Jack’s greatest works were never published in his lifetime. The Kerouac estate has been releasing stuff from the archives over the last 10 years... He had a brief moment in the sun, but the right wing launched a major attack on him. They saw him as a major threat to society. They really succeeded in knocking him down."
Attacks Continue: The New York Times reported in an early June 2005 article that according to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books by having them removed from shelves or reading lists, that 547 books were challenged in 2004, up from 458 in 2003. Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she told the Times. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected. And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year." The Oklahoma house approved a $6.68 million budget for state libraries in May and vowed to study local library policies on the placement of gay themed books on children’s shelves. Sally Kearn, a member of the house subcommittee that funds the libraries, had threatened to withhold extra funding for libraries over the issue o gay-themed books. Earlier in the month, the Oklahoma house voted overwhelmingly to recommend creating adult-only sections in all public libraries to shield children from gay-themed books. In late April, police in the Boston suburb of Lexington, MA arrested a father after he refused to leave his six-year-old son’s elementary school over a book that featured a gay family. The father spent the night in jail and was freed after being ordered off school property. Also in late April, Chris Crain, editorial director of the Window media newspaper chain which operates the Washington Blade and Southern Voice, among other newspapers, was beaten by seven men in Amsterdam while he was walking hand-in-hand with his boyfriend early one morning. "I hope our gay friends in Holland realize that it’s a bit too soon to declare victory and go home, now that they’ve won their legal battles," Crain wrote in a subsequent editorial in his newspapers. "Winning the hearts and minds of the people will be a much more challenging task."
Off the Shelves: Cuttyhunk, Boston’s 12-year old gay bookstore, will close in late summer of 2005. Formerly known as We Think the World of You, owner Paul Rehme will close the store to "seek new challenges, including the creation of an exciting new real estate company," as relayed on the bookstore’s Web site. The 18 year-old Tomes & Treasures, the Tampa gay bookstore, gift shop, and coffee house located for the last eight years at its current S. Howard Avenue location, closed in June 2005. Owner Bill Kanouff told the St. Petersburg Times that large bookstore chains, the Internet, and the "mainstreaming of gay culture" helped bring about the store’s demise.
Passages: Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who partnered with director James Ivory to create the award-winning adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View, Maurice, and Howards End, died May 25, 2005 in London. He was 68. Born in 1936 in what was then Bombay, Mr. Merchant moved to New York in 1958 and earned a master’s in business administration at New York University. His professional partnership with Mr. Ivory continued for 44-years. Mr. Ivory survives him, as do four sisters: Saherbanu Kabadia and Ruksana Khan, both of Mumbai; Sahida Retiwala of Bergenfield, N.J.; and Rashida Bootwala of Pune, India.
Activist and author Jack Nichols died on May 2, 2005, in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 67. The cause was complications of cancer. Nichols was born in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 1938, and came out as gay to his parents as a teenager. Along with Frank Kameny, Nichols founded the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy group, in Washington in 1961. In 1967, Mr. Nichols became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television when he appeared in the CBS documentary "’The Homosexuals." For years Nichols was one of the activists who campaigned to have the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1969, after moving to New York, Mr. Nichols founded Gay, the first gay weekly newspaper in the United States, with his companion, Lige Clarke (who died in 1975). Until recently, Nichols also edited the online publication GayToday.com. Among Mr. Nichols’s books are Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin, 1975); The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus, 1996); and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (Harrington Park Press, 2004), which was nominated for a 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Memoir/Autobiography category.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
