March Publishing Notes

The buzz: The London Evening Standard's theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh has turned playwright to write Plague Over England, a new play about Sir John Gielgud’s triumphant return from a 1953 gay sex scandal, which recently debuted in London at the Finborough Theater. Two plays based on the 1920s Leopold and Loeb crimes recently opened in LA: Thrill Me by Stephen Dolginoff and Dickie and Babe by Daniel Henning. The restless yearning towards my Self, a poem by Perry Brass set to music by Paula M. Kimper, will debut in New York City this month. Bash’d, a gay rap opera by Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow, with music by Aaron Macri, is gearing up for a commercial off-Broaway run. Mike Jones, the escort who exposed Ted Haggard in a sex scandal, will play himself in a new one-man show, Naked Before God, in Denver in March. Novelist Frank Anthony Pollo is urging a boycott of the film version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, based on the novel by Michael Chabon, because the adaptation cuts out the gay character of Arthur. Details are at Pollo’s MySpace page: www.myspace.com/mysteriesofpittsburgh. Kensington will publish Pollo’s novel, Band Fags!, in June. Timothy State’s blog Balancing Boyfriends is excerpted in the Japanese-English text book, Try Reading Blogs in English, published by Tokyo’s Kosaido Publishing Company. Writer and editor Michael Luongo is teaching travel writing courses at NYU this month and in Tuscany in May for the Il Chiostro program. Simon & Schuster will publish Gary Marmorstein’s Lorenz Hart: An American Life. Writer and editor Steve Berman found so many worthy stories to include in his planned Best Gay Fiction 2008 that he is spinning off a second anthology of speculative fiction from the entries, titled Wilde Side. Both titles will be available by late spring. Prime Books is also reprinting Berman’s earlier anthology of queer fairie stories, So Fey. David Sedaris has changed the title of his new book of essays from All the Beauty You’ll Ever Need to When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Release date is June 3 with a print run of 650,000 copies. An appeals judge tossed out a Lexington, Massachsuetts couple’s case against their child’s school, which had the audacity to read a fairy tale about two kings in love. Lambda Rising’s Baltimore LGBT bookstore will close this spring, but longtime Lambda Rising Baltimore store manager Michael Leommon plans to open Saratoga Coffee Bar in Baltimore, a café that will also sell books. Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, a feminist and LGBT bookstore in South Minneapolis is being sold, because of the financial condition of the store. The bookstore is the oldest feminist bookstore in the country. Amazon Bookstore gained fame as part of a highly publicized lawsuit against Amazon.com in the late 1990s.

Kudos: Freeheld: The Laurel Hester Story, Cynthia Wade’s documentary about the New Jersey lesbian police officer’s struggle to have her domestic partner recognized as her next of kin, won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Winners of the The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards for Short Fiction, representing the best science fiction, fantasy or horror short fiction with significant positive GLBT content, are “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold from the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, “Instinct” by Joy Parks from the anthology The Future Is Queer, and “The Language of Moths” by Christopher Barzak from the magazine Realms of Fantasy. In the Other Work category, the three winners are: the anthology The Future Is Queer, edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the television series Torchwood, created by Russell T Davies, and the film V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue. The juries for the awards also identified a Short List of Recommended works, which can be found at http://www.spectrumawards.org/. Nominations for the 2008 Awards are open and the 2008 Awards will be presented at Gaylaxicon 2008 in Washington DC in October 2008.

Open Calls: Editor Richard Labonté is seeking stories for the 2009 edition of Best Gay Erotica, which will be judged this season by James Lear. Deadline is April 15, 2008. Original stories of 6000 words or less or work published between July 2007 and July 2008 are eligible. Submissions should be sent to mailto:bge2008@gmail.com in *.doc format. ** Labonté is also editing several other anthologies for Cleis Press, including Bears: Gay Erotic Stories. Deadline is March 15, 2008, and stories should be 8000 words or less. Submissions should be sent to cleiseditor@gmail.com. ** For Best Gay Romance 2009, stories should be 6000 words or less. Deadline: May 20, 2008. Submissions to cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put BGR 2009 in the subject line. ** For the erotic anthology Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction, Labonté is looking for stories 6000 words or less. Deadline is Aug. 15, 2008. Submissions to: cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put "Daddies" in the subject line. ** For the erotic anthology Boy Crazy: The First Time, Labonté is looking for sexual/erotic coming-out short stories, 6000 words or less. Deadline is Oct. 15, 2008. Submissions to cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put"Boy Crazy" in the subject line. ** The British queer literary journal Chroma is planning a themed issue on the “Americas.” Deadline is August 15, 2008. ** Chroma is also sponsoring its Queer Writing Competition in Poetry and Short Story. Deadline is September 1, 2008. For more details visit the Chroma Web site. **