September Publishing Notes

The buzz: TLA Releasing has acquired the distribution rights to the film version of Matthew Rettenmund’s novel, Boy Culture. The film won the Jury Award for Best Feature at the 2006 Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Jury Award for Best Screenplay at the 2006 Outfest in Los Angeles. Wolfe Releasing has acquired the home video rights to the documentary Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema. UCLA and Outfest have announced the first two feature films slated to be restored as part of the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation: Parting Glances (1986), starring Steve Buscemi, and the groundbreaking Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1978). The Legacy Project has already established the world’s largest publicly accessible collection of LGBT films. Allegations of authorial fraud have led Antidote International Films to sue Bloomsbury Publishing in Federal Court. Antidote bought film rights to the novel Sarah, in August 2003, believing defendants’ assertion that it was an autobiographical tale of author “J.T. Leroy’s rising literary star, his celebrity, his tawdry, tragic and edgy personal history”. But in fact, “defendant Laura Albert wrote J.T. Leroy’s books, faked his biography, faked his persona, and hired her common-law husband’s half-sister Savannah to portray the androgynous young writer when it was necessary for J.T. Leroy to appear in public,” Antidote claims. Harvey Fierstein has joined the cast of NBC’s The Year Without A Santa Claus, a two-hour movie to be broadcast during the 2006 holiday season. Blythe Danner will star in an off-Broadway revival of Tennessee Willliams’ Suddenly Last Summer this fall. Douglas Carter Beane’s play, The Little Dog Laughed, about a closeted Hollywood star, will begin previews on Broadway in October. A London revival of Martin Sherman’s play Bent, starring Alan Cumming, will open in October. Instinct magazine has purchased Gay Travel News. In October, the Houston GLBT Community Center will debut Montrose, an online journal featuring writing and art by local GLBT talent. A new bookstore in Indianapolis, A Shade of Gray, opened two months ago focusing on books for women, people of color, and the gay community. Limited and deluxe editions of Treasures of Gay Art from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, edited by Peter Weiermair and with essays by James Saslow and Allen Ellenzweig, along with 180 full color page reproductions, is now available by special order. Visit the Leslie/Lohman Foundation for more details.

Kudos: Sara Waters latest novel, The Night Watch, has made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Michael Cunningham’s novella, “In the Machine” from Specimen Days, has been nominated for a 2006 World Fantasy Award. James Purdy and Vestal McIntyre were among the authors receiving fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2006. Actor and author Leslie Jordan took home an Emmy Award for Best Guest Actor for his role on NBC’s Will & Grace.

Open calls: Blithe House Quarterly is currently accepting submissions for its Spring 2007 issue. Stories should be previously unpublished and no more than 7500 words in length. E-mail submissions to adalvarez@aol.com. Lee Hayes is editing Flesh to Flesh, a gay erotic anthology for Books/Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster. Stories should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words. Deadline is November 1, 2006. All submissions must be sent to: Strebor Books International, Attn: Lee Hayes, P.O. Box 6505, Largo, MD 20792. Alyson and editor Sean Fisher are assembling Dorm Porn 2: More Steamy Tales of Men on Campus. Stories should be between 2,500 and 4,000 words. Deadline is September 15, 2006. E-mail submissions to erotica@alyson.com. Journalist Charles Michael Smith is looking for material for At the Old Place: A Gay & Lesbian Bar Anthology. The book will acknowledge and explore the many facets of gay and lesbian bar life as well as emphasize the importance of these establishments to the community over the years. Topics will include how to choose a bar, how to cruise in a bar, gay bars of the past, backroom-bar experiences, alcoholism in the gay community, my first time in a gay or lesbian bar, the bar in gay literature, the emergence of bar ‘zines like New York’s Homo Xtra, and gay bars across the United States and in foreign countries. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Send submissions in duplicate to: Charles Michael Smith, 1864 7th Avenue, Apt. #4, New York, NY 10026.