April Publishing Notes

The buzz: Michael Connor is the new editor of Insightout Book club. Judy Weider has stepped down as the editorial director of LPI Media Inc, parent company of The Advocate. Lloyd Fan as stepped in as CEO of Triangle Multi-Media Limited and Q Television Network, taking over from founder Frank Olsen. Harper’s magazine is drawing the wrath of AIDS researchers and activists for an article by Celia Farber in its March 2006 issue that gives credence to the theories that HIV does not cause AIDS. After surviving Katrina, writer Jamie Joy Gatto and her boyfriend Ben are getting married later this year. Edwin Blair auctioned first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts, and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski and raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit his friend and fellow Big Easy residents Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband Jon, who published some of Bukowski’s early works. The New York Public Library purchased the 11,000-page personal archive of author William S. Burroughs for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, which also houses Jack Kerouac’s literary and personal archive. Patricia Highsmith is the subject of a multimedia exhibition at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Suspect Thoughts Press, the “archipelago of misfit books,” is in the process of launching several new imprints, including She Devil Press and a future children’s imprint, Suspect Tots. Some Men, playwright Terrence McNally’s new musically tinged comedy-drama about the current state of gay America, begins previews in Philadelphia May 12, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. Plans are afoot to bring the 1980 disco film Xanadu to Broadway as a stage musical in spring 2007. Playwright Douglas Carter Beane is putting together the libretto, and the musical will use the John Farrar–Jeff Lynne songs from the movie. Director Christopher Ashley hopes to have an out-of-town tryout up and running this fall. A Very Serious Person, co-written and directed by playwright and performer Charles Busch, will premiere at the fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival in April. The film is about a young boy obsessed with show tunes and vintage Hollywood. Producing duo Neil Meron and Craig Zeron are eying a film version of Going All the Way about baseball player Billy Bean. The Weinstein Company has optioned the movie rights to several stories by New York Times reporter Warren St. John on his revelations of JT Leroy literary hoax.

Brokeback Backlash: Yes, it failed to get Best Picture Oscar trophy. While author Annie Proulx wrote of her disappointment in The Guardian and fans chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page thank you ad in Daily Variety, actor Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit saying that he was the victim of a “movie-laundering” scheme by the studio division behind the movie. The night before the Oscar loss, the film was named Best Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards. The movie also receieved top honors at the recent GLAAD Media Awards.

Kudos: On the long list for Britain’s Orange Prize is Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Night Watch. Lorrie Moore, who has written a few terrific gay-themed short stories in her career, was elected to membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alan Bennett won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. Geoff Ryman’s novel Air: Or, Have Not Have won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors science fiction and fantasy works that explore and expand gender roles. Ryman is the author of numerous award-winning books, including 253, or Tube Theatre.

Open calls: Author Greg Herren is editing an anthology of queer themed science fiction titled Distant Horizons, to be published by Positronic Press in the summer of 2007. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006. No electronic submissions will be accepted. A printed copy of the short story should be sent to: 5500 Prytania Street #215, New Orleans, LA 70115. For more details, query Greg at gregh121@aol.com. Editor Michael Luongo is looking for submissions of gay travel erotica for Between the Palms II. E-mail mtluongo@hotmail.com for more details. Deadline is May 30, 2006. The deadline for the annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the best GLBT single poem in any style or length is June 27, 2006. Poems should be submitted with a separate cover sheet with name, address, telephone, and email address. Judging is done anonymously. The award carries a $100.00 prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. For complete guidelines and details, e-mail givalpress@yahoo.com or visit: www.givalpress.com. The winner is usually announced on or before September 1, 2006. And a new online literary journal, Wild About Oscar, is looking for submissions. E-mail editor@wildaboutoscar.com for more details.

In Memoriam: Warner, Seven Stories, Beacon Press, The Carl Brandon Society, Writers House, and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame have jointly created the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor the science fiction writer who died in February. The fund will “enable writers of colors to attend on of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. ” It has been established to honor and affirm her legacy by providing the same opportunity and experience Ms. Butler had to guture generations of emerging writers of color. The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will be awarded in 2007. More details of the application process will be announced later this year at CarlBrandon.org.

Books for Katrina Victims: The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles to designate for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. If you would like to contribute, please send your books to: Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112. If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate. For more information, visit http://nutrias.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp .

Passages: Nick Hornack, also know as the gay author Alexander Renault, died in February, 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 38 years old. Writing and editing as Alexander Renault, Hornack published work in a variety of genres from pet magazines to feminist works, and had short stories and interviews featured on a number of Web sites, including Mind Caviar, Ophelia’s Muse, Scarlet Letters, and Velvet Mafia. He was also the editor of the anthology Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of their Mothers, which he published as a print-on-demand book after it was turned down by several publishing houses. He had a long career in the mental health field and lived in rural Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs.