The buzz: The Leslie/Lohman Gay Art and Foundation and Gallery premieres their new exhibition space in Soho this month at 26 Wooster Street. Letters and rare family photos of Truman Capote are now on permanent display in the restored Old Courthouse in Monroeville, Alabama, where the author spent his childhood. Aaron Hicklin, editor in chief of BlackBook, has taken over the role of editor in chief of Out. Christie Hefner, chief executive of Playboy Enterprises, is eyeing the gay market, with a launch targeted first in the UK. Samuel R. Delaney is one of the featured writers this summer at the 2006 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in East Lansing Michigan. Achy Obejas will teach a fiction workshop in Sayulita, Mexico in June as part of Talleres Toltecatl. Land in central Wisconsin that was once home to a murderer whose story inspired a novel by Robert Bloch and the movie Psycho (with Tony Perkins as Norman Bates) was pulled from an online auction at Ebay. Vampire Vow, Michael Schiefelbein’s novel of an ancient Roman officer falling in love with Jesus Christ before becoming a vampire, has been option as a film by Shattering Paradigms Entertainment. The next project from Funny Boy Films, the force behind Adam & Steve and Latter Days, will be an adaptation of Neil Miller’s Sex Crime Panic. The Longtime GLBT newspaper in South Florida, The Weekly News, has shuttered. Congrats to Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the terrific Suspect Thoughts duo, who found a new home in Oakland and will keep the press in San Francisco. Lawrence Schimel’s new collection of short stories, Two Boys in Love, debuts in English after prior publications in Catalan, Spanish, German, and Greek. Carole Spearin McCauley’s 12th novel, A Winning Death, is forthcoming from Hilliard & Harris. Kensington will publish Andrew Beierle’s new novel, First Person Plural, in 2007. Lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary doctorate in music at Boston’s Berklee College of Music this month. A suburban New York high school canceled an appearance by noted transgender author and activist Kate Bornstein after complaints from a local businessman. And Rosie O’Donnell could be headed towards The View, replacing Meredith Viera, who replaces Katie Couric on the Today show.
Kudos: Allan Gurganus was awarded a Fiction Fellowship from the John Simon Guggeheim Memorial Foundation. Among the writers receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts were Vestal McIntyre, Andrew Sean Greer, and Patrick Ryan. Authors Krandall Kraus and Richard McCann were awarded fiction fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Sarah Waters new novel, The Night Watch, has been shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Short story author Alice Munro will receive the MacDowell Medal in August for her outstanding contribution to the arts. The short list for Britain’s new National Short Story Prize includes “Men of Ireland,” a story by 77-year old legend William Trevor. The winner recieves £15,000.
Lambda Literary Update: The Lambda Literary awards will be Thursday May 18. The reception will begin at 6:00 pm, ceremonies at 7:00 pm, and a post-reception party at 9:30 p.m. Location is the Human Rights Campaign Headquarters, 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20036-3278.
Open calls: Alyson Books is collecting stories for Best Date Ever: True Stories That Celebrate Gay Relationships and its lesbian counterpart. Deadline is July 31, 2006. Stories should be sent to bestdate@alyson.com. Editor Rob Knight is looking for stories for Shifting Again, an anthology about “shape shifters,” and Eternal Darkness, an anthology about vampires, both for Torquere Press. Deadline is June 1, 2006. Stories can be submitted to submissions@torquerepress.com. Author C. Bard Cole has morphed his Six Bricks Press into an online quarterly journal, Six Little Things, each issue with a new theme. Check out the Web site www.sixbrickspress.com for more details. The summer 2006 issue of cyberzine Hand-Tooth-Nail will focus on alternate images, voices and representations of “Queerness and Masculinity.” Check out the Web site, www.handtoothnail.com, for more details. Chroma, the popular British queer literary journal, is launching an international Queer Writing Competition. Categories are Short Story, Poetry, and a TransFabulous Award. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details, visit the Web site www.chromajournal.co.uk. Zeus, a new national gay men’s magazine is looking for freelance writers. Email editor@zeusmagazine.com for more details. And Velvet Mafia is looking for a few good young men. Writers 35 and under will be the focus of the e-zine’s 21st issue. Submissions must be received before October 1st, 2006 at editor@velvetmafia.com.
Royal Rumble: Reuters reported that two sets of parents filed a lawsuit on in April against the town of Lexington, Massachusetts and its public school system after a teacher read King & King, a gay-themed fairy tale, to a classroom of about 20 children, most of whom were 7 years old, without notifying the parents first. The lawsuit also charges that the school broke a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring that parents be notified of sex education lessons. King & King, written by two Dutch women, Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland, and published in 2002 by Berkley California publisher Tricycle Press, tells the story of a crown prince who rejects a bevy of beautiful princesses, rebuffing each potential mate until falling in love with a prince. The two marry, sealing the union with a kiss, and live happily ever after. King & King was ranked eighth among the top 10 books people wanted removed from libraries in 2004, according to the American Library Association. Complaints about the 32-page book first surfaced in 2004 in North Carolina. The book has sold about 15,000 copies in the United States. A sequel, King, King and Family, about a royal gay family, was published two years later. Paul Ash, the superintendent of schools for Lexington, said that reading King & King was not intended as sex education but as a way to educate children about the world in which they live, especially in Massachusetts, the only U.S. state in which gay and lesbian couples can legally wed. It was read during a lesson about different types of weddings. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Boston, alleges violations of the federal civil rights of the two sets of parents, David and Tonia Parker and Rob and Robin Wirthlin. It also accuses the town and school officials of violating the Massachusetts civil rights code and the state’s parental notification law, according to the parents’ attorney, Boston law firm Denner Associates. The dispute erupted when Robin Wirthlin complained to the school’s principal after her 7-year-old son told her about the reading last month. She then turned to the conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group Parents Rights Coalition. David Parker has been at odds with the town’s school system since he was arrested a year ago for trespassing when he refused to leave school grounds until authorities promised to excuse his son from classroom discussions on same-sex parents. His son, who at the time was about 5 years old, had brought home a “diversity book bag” that included the book Who’s in a Family? The book includes pictures of same-sex parents along with other types of families.
Passages: Elizabeth Maguire, a publisher of noted wit and passion who in a 25-year career worked with historians, theologians, and other nonfiction authors, died April 8, 2006, of ovarian cancer. She was 47. She is survived by her partner, Karen Wolny. Born in the Bronx on Dec. 12, 1958, and raised in Harrison, NY, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard in 1980. Since 2002, Maguire had served as publisher of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus, after previously working at numerous publishers including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Addison Wesley Longman, and the Free Press. A champion of African-American nonfiction, she was also responsible for publishing many gay authors, including historian George Chauncey. She was also the author a novel, Thinner, Blonder, Whiter, published by Carroll & Graf in 2002.
Gerard Reve, considered one of the Dutch postwar literary greats, died April 8, 2006. He was 82. Reve, whose full name was Gerard Kornelis van het Reve, published his first novel, De Avonden (The Evenings), in 1947, about a disaffected office worker. Reve’s controversial books Op Weg Naar Het Einde (Approaching the End, 1963) and Nader tot U (Nearer to Thee, 1966) dealt openly with the author’s homosexuality and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Nader tot U sparked controversy because Reve wrote about having sex with God, who appeared to him in the guise of a donkey. He was prosecuted for blasphemy, but cleared in 1968. He published many autobiographical books that were often a mixture of letters and novels. He won top literary honors, including the P. C. Hooft Prize in 1968 and the Prize of Dutch Letters in 2001. His books have been translated into French, German, English and several Eastern European languages. Reve, who had Alzheimer’s disease, spent his final two years in a nursing home in Belgium.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Sunday, April 02, 2006
April Publishing Notes
The buzz: Michael Connor is the new editor of Insightout Book club. Judy Weider has stepped down as the editorial director of LPI Media Inc, parent company of The Advocate. Lloyd Fan as stepped in as CEO of Triangle Multi-Media Limited and Q Television Network, taking over from founder Frank Olsen. Harper’s magazine is drawing the wrath of AIDS researchers and activists for an article by Celia Farber in its March 2006 issue that gives credence to the theories that HIV does not cause AIDS. After surviving Katrina, writer Jamie Joy Gatto and her boyfriend Ben are getting married later this year. Edwin Blair auctioned first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts, and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski and raised $225,000 in San Francisco to benefit his friend and fellow Big Easy residents Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband Jon, who published some of Bukowski’s early works. The New York Public Library purchased the 11,000-page personal archive of author William S. Burroughs for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, which also houses Jack Kerouac’s literary and personal archive. Patricia Highsmith is the subject of a multimedia exhibition at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Suspect Thoughts Press, the “archipelago of misfit books,” is in the process of launching several new imprints, including She Devil Press and a future children’s imprint, Suspect Tots. Some Men, playwright Terrence McNally’s new musically tinged comedy-drama about the current state of gay America, begins previews in Philadelphia May 12, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. Plans are afoot to bring the 1980 disco film Xanadu to Broadway as a stage musical in spring 2007. Playwright Douglas Carter Beane is putting together the libretto, and the musical will use the John Farrar–Jeff Lynne songs from the movie. Director Christopher Ashley hopes to have an out-of-town tryout up and running this fall. A Very Serious Person, co-written and directed by playwright and performer Charles Busch, will premiere at the fifth annual Tribeca Film Festival in April. The film is about a young boy obsessed with show tunes and vintage Hollywood. Producing duo Neil Meron and Craig Zeron are eying a film version of Going All the Way about baseball player Billy Bean. The Weinstein Company has optioned the movie rights to several stories by New York Times reporter Warren St. John on his revelations of JT Leroy literary hoax.
Brokeback Backlash: Yes, it failed to get Best Picture Oscar trophy. While author Annie Proulx wrote of her disappointment in The Guardian and fans chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page thank you ad in Daily Variety, actor Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit saying that he was the victim of a “movie-laundering” scheme by the studio division behind the movie. The night before the Oscar loss, the film was named Best Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards. The movie also receieved top honors at the recent GLAAD Media Awards.
Kudos: On the long list for Britain’s Orange Prize is Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Night Watch. Lorrie Moore, who has written a few terrific gay-themed short stories in her career, was elected to membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alan Bennett won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. Geoff Ryman’s novel Air: Or, Have Not Have won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors science fiction and fantasy works that explore and expand gender roles. Ryman is the author of numerous award-winning books, including 253, or Tube Theatre.
Open calls: Author Greg Herren is editing an anthology of queer themed science fiction titled Distant Horizons, to be published by Positronic Press in the summer of 2007. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006. No electronic submissions will be accepted. A printed copy of the short story should be sent to: 5500 Prytania Street #215, New Orleans, LA 70115. For more details, query Greg at gregh121@aol.com. Editor Michael Luongo is looking for submissions of gay travel erotica for Between the Palms II. E-mail mtluongo@hotmail.com for more details. Deadline is May 30, 2006. The deadline for the annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the best GLBT single poem in any style or length is June 27, 2006. Poems should be submitted with a separate cover sheet with name, address, telephone, and email address. Judging is done anonymously. The award carries a $100.00 prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. For complete guidelines and details, e-mail givalpress@yahoo.com or visit: www.givalpress.com. The winner is usually announced on or before September 1, 2006. And a new online literary journal, Wild About Oscar, is looking for submissions. E-mail editor@wildaboutoscar.com for more details.
In Memoriam: Warner, Seven Stories, Beacon Press, The Carl Brandon Society, Writers House, and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame have jointly created the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor the science fiction writer who died in February. The fund will “enable writers of colors to attend on of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. ” It has been established to honor and affirm her legacy by providing the same opportunity and experience Ms. Butler had to guture generations of emerging writers of color. The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will be awarded in 2007. More details of the application process will be announced later this year at CarlBrandon.org.
Books for Katrina Victims: The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles to designate for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. If you would like to contribute, please send your books to: Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112. If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate. For more information, visit http://nutrias.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp .
Passages: Nick Hornack, also know as the gay author Alexander Renault, died in February, 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 38 years old. Writing and editing as Alexander Renault, Hornack published work in a variety of genres from pet magazines to feminist works, and had short stories and interviews featured on a number of Web sites, including Mind Caviar, Ophelia’s Muse, Scarlet Letters, and Velvet Mafia. He was also the editor of the anthology Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of their Mothers, which he published as a print-on-demand book after it was turned down by several publishing houses. He had a long career in the mental health field and lived in rural Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs.
Brokeback Backlash: Yes, it failed to get Best Picture Oscar trophy. While author Annie Proulx wrote of her disappointment in The Guardian and fans chipped in more than $24,000 to buy a full-page thank you ad in Daily Variety, actor Randy Quaid filed a $10 million lawsuit saying that he was the victim of a “movie-laundering” scheme by the studio division behind the movie. The night before the Oscar loss, the film was named Best Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards. The movie also receieved top honors at the recent GLAAD Media Awards.
Kudos: On the long list for Britain’s Orange Prize is Sarah Waters’s latest novel, The Night Watch. Lorrie Moore, who has written a few terrific gay-themed short stories in her career, was elected to membership of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Alan Bennett won the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year at the British Book Awards. Geoff Ryman’s novel Air: Or, Have Not Have won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which honors science fiction and fantasy works that explore and expand gender roles. Ryman is the author of numerous award-winning books, including 253, or Tube Theatre.
Open calls: Author Greg Herren is editing an anthology of queer themed science fiction titled Distant Horizons, to be published by Positronic Press in the summer of 2007. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2006. No electronic submissions will be accepted. A printed copy of the short story should be sent to: 5500 Prytania Street #215, New Orleans, LA 70115. For more details, query Greg at gregh121@aol.com. Editor Michael Luongo is looking for submissions of gay travel erotica for Between the Palms II. E-mail mtluongo@hotmail.com for more details. Deadline is May 30, 2006. The deadline for the annual Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award for the best GLBT single poem in any style or length is June 27, 2006. Poems should be submitted with a separate cover sheet with name, address, telephone, and email address. Judging is done anonymously. The award carries a $100.00 prize. Reading fee is $5.00 per poem. For complete guidelines and details, e-mail givalpress@yahoo.com or visit: www.givalpress.com. The winner is usually announced on or before September 1, 2006. And a new online literary journal, Wild About Oscar, is looking for submissions. E-mail editor@wildaboutoscar.com for more details.
In Memoriam: Warner, Seven Stories, Beacon Press, The Carl Brandon Society, Writers House, and the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame have jointly created the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund to honor the science fiction writer who died in February. The fund will “enable writers of colors to attend on of the Clarion writing workshops where Ms. Butler got her start. ” It has been established to honor and affirm her legacy by providing the same opportunity and experience Ms. Butler had to guture generations of emerging writers of color. The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will be awarded in 2007. More details of the application process will be announced later this year at CarlBrandon.org.
Books for Katrina Victims: The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock the shelves after the devastations of Hurricane Katrina. The library staff will assess which titles to designate for its collections. The rest will be distributed to destitute families or sold for library fundraising. If you would like to contribute, please send your books to: Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations, New Orleans Public Library, 219 Loyola Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70112. If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less than the book rate. For more information, visit http://nutrias.org/ and http://www.snopes.com/katrina/charity/library.asp .
Passages: Nick Hornack, also know as the gay author Alexander Renault, died in February, 2006 as a result of injuries sustained in a car accident. He was 38 years old. Writing and editing as Alexander Renault, Hornack published work in a variety of genres from pet magazines to feminist works, and had short stories and interviews featured on a number of Web sites, including Mind Caviar, Ophelia’s Muse, Scarlet Letters, and Velvet Mafia. He was also the editor of the anthology Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of their Mothers, which he published as a print-on-demand book after it was turned down by several publishing houses. He had a long career in the mental health field and lived in rural Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
And The Nominees Are
Twenty-one books are finalists for the seven categories of awards given by the Publishing Triangle. Here’s the list of nominees:
A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Branwell by Douglas A. Martin (Soft Skull Press) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Brian in Three Seasons by Patricia Grossman (Permanent Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Collected Poems with Notes Toward the Memoirs by Djuna Barnes, edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson Books) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale University Press) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Cut Off the Ears of Winter by Peter Covino (New Issues) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Directed by Desire by June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Gotta Find Me an Angel by Brenda Brooks (Raincoast Books) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Loose End by Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
My One-Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
On the Ice by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Star Dust by Frank Bidart (Farrar Straus Giroux) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Still Life With June by Darren Greer (Cormorant Books) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Basic Books) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Wild Girls by Diana Souhami (St. Martin’s Press) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (University of Minnesota Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Ninety-eight books were nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards: Here’s a list of the nominees:
Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Antonio's Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Children’s Book Press) Children's/Young Adult
Artist’s Dream by Gerri Hill (Bella Books) Romance
Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) Lesbian Fiction
Best Gay Erotica 2006, ed. by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Richard Labonte (Cleis) Erotica
Best Lesbian Erotica 2006, ed. by Eileen Myles and Tristan Taormino (Cleis) Erotica
Beyond Recall by Mary Meigs and Lise Weil (Talonbooks) Biography
Beyond the Down Low by Keith Boykin (Carroll & Graf) Nonfiction
Bilal's Bread by Sulyman X (Alyson) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Bliss by Fiona Zedde (Kensington) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Blue on Blue Ground by Aaron Smith (Pittsburgh) Gay Men's Poetry
Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, ed. Emanuel Xavier (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Cajun Snuff by W. Randy Haynes (Publish America) Gay Men's Mystery
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Close Contact by Sean Wolfe (Kensington) Erotica
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale) Gay Men's Poetry
Darkness Descending by Penny Mickelbury (Kings Crossing) Lesbian Mystery
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar De Alba (Arte Publico) Lesbian Mystery
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon) Lesbian Poetry
Distant Shores, Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Romance
Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday) Humor
Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men, ed. Wendell Ricketts (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Eye of Water by Amber Flora Thomas (Pittsburgh) Lesbian Poetry
Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (Random House) Gay Men's Fiction
February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin) Biography
Five Books of Moses Lapinsky by Karen Tulchinsky (Raincoast Books) Lesbian Fiction
Fledgling by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Lui (Southern Illinois) Gay Men's Poetry
Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men’s Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf) Anthology
Fumbling Toward Divinity by Craig Hickman (Annabessacook Farm) Spirituality
German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene (Wisconsin) Gay Men's Fiction
Gore Vidal’s America by Dennis Altman (Polity Press) Nonfiction
I Am This One Walking Beside Me by Daniel Gebhardt (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
In Too Deep by Ronica Black (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Invasion of Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, (Alyson Books) Humor
Juicy Mother by Jennifer Camper (Soft Skull Press) Humor
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Just Like That by Karin Kallmaker (Bella Books) Romance
Justice Served by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Mystery
Lesbian Communities Festivals, Rvs And the Internet, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Penny Sablove (Harrington Park Press) LGBT Studies
Lesbian Pulp Fiction, ed. Katherine Forrest (Cleis) Anthology
Life Mask by Jackie Kay (Bloodaxe Books) Lesbian Poetry
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt) Lesbian Fiction
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West by Ruth Vanita (Palgrave Macmillan) LGBT Studies
Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree (Soft Skull Press) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann (Pantheon) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
My One Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) Belles Lettres
New and Selected Poems, Volume II by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) Lesbian Poetry
No Sister of Mine by Jeanne G’Fellers (Bella Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger (The Disinformation Company) Biography
One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Mystery
Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (Counterpoint Press) Belles Lettres
Rainbow Road by Alex Sanchez (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Raising Boys without Men by Peggy Drexler (Rodale) Nonfiction
Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, & Sluts, ed. Anna Camilleri (Arsenal Pulp Press) Anthology
Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck (5 Spot, Warner Books) Humor
Rode Hard But Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica edited by Sacchi Green & Rakelle Valencia (Suspect Thoughts) Erotica
School of the Arts by Mark Doty (HarperCollins) Gay Men's Poetry
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (Wisconsin) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Shapers of Darkness by David B. Coe (Tor) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Erotica
Sugar by Martin Pousson (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Poetry
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books) Children's/Young Adult
Tab Hunter Confidential by Tab Hunter, with Eddie Muller (Algonquin) Belles Lettres
Temple Landfall by Jane Fletcher (Bold Strokes) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Actor’s Guide to Greed by Rick Copp (Kensington) Gay Men's Mystery
The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts) Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (Henry Holt) Biography
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
The Iron Girl by Ellen Hart (St. Martins Minotaur) Lesbian Mystery
The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey (GLB Publishers) Gay Men's Mystery
The Price of Temptation by M. J. Pearson (Seventh Window) Romance
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon) Transgender/GenderQueer
The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (Spinifex) Spirituality
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) Belles Lettres
Totally Joe by James Howe (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Walt Loves the Bearcat by Randy Boyd (West Beach Books) Romance
What the L ? by Kate Clinton (Carroll & Graf) Humor
What We Do is Secret by Kief Hillsbery (Villard) Gay Men's Fiction
When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman (Columbia) LGBT Studies
When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg, illustrated by Tom Bachtell (Regan Books) Belles Lettres
Where the Apple Falls by Samiya Bashir (redbone press) Lesbian Poetry
White Tiger by Michael Allen Dymmoch (St. Martins Minotaur) Gay Men's Mystery
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch by Dwight A. McBride (NYU Press) LGBT Studies
Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrys (W. W. Norton) Lesbian Fiction
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, & Art by Diana Souhami (St. Martins) Biography
With or Without You by Lauren Sanders (Akashic) Lesbian Fiction
Women of Mystery edited by Katherine Forrest (Haworth) Lesbian Mystery
Women Together/Women Apart by Tirza True Latimer (Rutgers) Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota) Nonfiction
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Zest for Life: Lesbians’ Experience of Menopause by Jennifer Kelly (Spinifex) LGBT Studies
A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Branwell by Douglas A. Martin (Soft Skull Press) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Brian in Three Seasons by Patricia Grossman (Permanent Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Collected Poems with Notes Toward the Memoirs by Djuna Barnes, edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson Books) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale University Press) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Cut Off the Ears of Winter by Peter Covino (New Issues) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Directed by Desire by June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon) The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Gotta Find Me an Angel by Brenda Brooks (Raincoast Books) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Loose End by Ivan E. Coyote (Arsenal Pulp Press) The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
My One-Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
On the Ice by Gretchen Legler (Milkweed Editions) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (University of Wisconsin Press) The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Star Dust by Frank Bidart (Farrar Straus Giroux) The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Still Life With June by Darren Greer (Cormorant Books) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna (Basic Books) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Wild Girls by Diana Souhami (St. Martin’s Press) The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (University of Minnesota Press) The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Ninety-eight books were nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards: Here’s a list of the nominees:
Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell & Justin Richardson (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Antonio's Card/La Tarjeta de Antonio by Rigoberto Gonzalez (Children’s Book Press) Children's/Young Adult
Artist’s Dream by Gerri Hill (Bella Books) Romance
Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) Lesbian Fiction
Best Gay Erotica 2006, ed. by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Richard Labonte (Cleis) Erotica
Best Lesbian Erotica 2006, ed. by Eileen Myles and Tristan Taormino (Cleis) Erotica
Beyond Recall by Mary Meigs and Lise Weil (Talonbooks) Biography
Beyond the Down Low by Keith Boykin (Carroll & Graf) Nonfiction
Bilal's Bread by Sulyman X (Alyson) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Bliss by Fiona Zedde (Kensington) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Blue on Blue Ground by Aaron Smith (Pittsburgh) Gay Men's Poetry
Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, ed. Emanuel Xavier (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Cajun Snuff by W. Randy Haynes (Publish America) Gay Men's Mystery
Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Close Contact by Sean Wolfe (Kensington) Erotica
Crashing America by Katia Noyes (Alyson) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale) Gay Men's Poetry
Darkness Descending by Penny Mickelbury (Kings Crossing) Lesbian Mystery
Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Deliver Me from Nowhere by Tennessee Jones (Soft Skull Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar De Alba (Arte Publico) Lesbian Mystery
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon) Lesbian Poetry
Distant Shores, Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Romance
Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday) Humor
Everything I Have is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men, ed. Wendell Ricketts (Suspect Thoughts) Anthology
Eye of Water by Amber Flora Thomas (Pittsburgh) Lesbian Poetry
Faith for Beginners by Aaron Hamburger (Random House) Gay Men's Fiction
February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin) Biography
Five Books of Moses Lapinsky by Karen Tulchinsky (Raincoast Books) Lesbian Fiction
Fledgling by Octavia Butler (Seven Stories) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Lui (Southern Illinois) Gay Men's Poetry
Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men’s Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf) Anthology
Fumbling Toward Divinity by Craig Hickman (Annabessacook Farm) Spirituality
German Officer’s Boy by Harlan Greene (Wisconsin) Gay Men's Fiction
Gore Vidal’s America by Dennis Altman (Polity Press) Nonfiction
I Am This One Walking Beside Me by Daniel Gebhardt (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
In a Queer Time and Place by Judith Halberstam (NYU Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
In Too Deep by Ronica Black (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Invasion of Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, (Alyson Books) Humor
Juicy Mother by Jennifer Camper (Soft Skull Press) Humor
Just Add Hormones by Matt Kailey (Beacon Press) Transgender/GenderQueer
Just Like That by Karin Kallmaker (Bella Books) Romance
Justice Served by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Lesbian Mystery
Lesbian Communities Festivals, Rvs And the Internet, edited by Esther D. Rothblum and Penny Sablove (Harrington Park Press) LGBT Studies
Lesbian Pulp Fiction, ed. Katherine Forrest (Cleis) Anthology
Life Mask by Jackie Kay (Bloodaxe Books) Lesbian Poetry
Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt) Lesbian Fiction
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West by Ruth Vanita (Palgrave Macmillan) LGBT Studies
Manstealing for Fat Girls by Michelle Embree (Soft Skull Press) Lesbian Debut Fiction
Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann (Pantheon) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
My One Night Stand with Cancer by Tania Katan (Alyson Books) Belles Lettres
New and Selected Poems, Volume II by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press) Lesbian Poetry
No Sister of Mine by Jeanne G’Fellers (Bella Books) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin by John Geiger (The Disinformation Company) Biography
One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Mystery
Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press) Spirituality
Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (Counterpoint Press) Belles Lettres
Rainbow Road by Alex Sanchez (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Raising Boys without Men by Peggy Drexler (Rodale) Nonfiction
Red Light: Superheroes, Saints, & Sluts, ed. Anna Camilleri (Arsenal Pulp Press) Anthology
Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck (5 Spot, Warner Books) Humor
Rode Hard But Away Wet: Lesbian Cowboy Erotica edited by Sacchi Green & Rakelle Valencia (Suspect Thoughts) Erotica
School of the Arts by Mark Doty (HarperCollins) Gay Men's Poetry
Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman (Wisconsin) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Shapers of Darkness by David B. Coe (Tor) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes) Erotica
Sugar by Martin Pousson (Suspect Thoughts) Gay Men's Poetry
Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books) Children's/Young Adult
Tab Hunter Confidential by Tab Hunter, with Eddie Muller (Algonquin) Belles Lettres
Temple Landfall by Jane Fletcher (Bold Strokes) Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Actor’s Guide to Greed by Rick Copp (Kensington) Gay Men's Mystery
The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts) Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (Henry Holt) Biography
The First Verse by Barry McCrea (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
The Iron Girl by Ellen Hart (St. Martins Minotaur) Lesbian Mystery
The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey (GLB Publishers) Gay Men's Mystery
The Price of Temptation by M. J. Pearson (Seventh Window) Romance
The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille (Pantheon) Transgender/GenderQueer
The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades by Munya Andrews (Spinifex) Spirituality
The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men's Fiction
The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) Belles Lettres
Totally Joe by James Howe (Simon & Schuster) Children's/Young Adult
Walt Loves the Bearcat by Randy Boyd (West Beach Books) Romance
What the L ? by Kate Clinton (Carroll & Graf) Humor
What We Do is Secret by Kief Hillsbery (Villard) Gay Men's Fiction
When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman (Columbia) LGBT Studies
When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg, illustrated by Tom Bachtell (Regan Books) Belles Lettres
Where the Apple Falls by Samiya Bashir (redbone press) Lesbian Poetry
White Tiger by Michael Allen Dymmoch (St. Martins Minotaur) Gay Men's Mystery
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch by Dwight A. McBride (NYU Press) LGBT Studies
Wild Dogs by Helen Humphrys (W. W. Norton) Lesbian Fiction
Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, & Art by Diana Souhami (St. Martins) Biography
With or Without You by Lauren Sanders (Akashic) Lesbian Fiction
Women of Mystery edited by Katherine Forrest (Haworth) Lesbian Mystery
Women Together/Women Apart by Tirza True Latimer (Rutgers) Nonfiction
Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota) Nonfiction
You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf) Gay Men’s Debut Fiction
Zest for Life: Lesbians’ Experience of Menopause by Jennifer Kelly (Spinifex) LGBT Studies
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
March Publishing Notes
The buzz: Andrew Lang will produce a film adaptation of Peter Lefcourt’s 1992 gay-themed baseball novel The Dreyfus Affair. Stone Village Pictures has optioned the film rights to A.M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life. Rock singer Marilyn Manson plans to play author Lewis Carroll in his self-penned “arthouse horror” film Phantasmagoria — The Visions of Lewis Carroll. The two shirts worn by the stars of Brokeback Mountain garnered a record $101,100.51 for Variety, the Children’s Charity of Southern California, in a recent eBay auction. Gay philanthropist and Hollywood memorabilia collector Tom Gregory placed the winning bid. The Broadway opening of Lestat, the Elton John musical based on the Anne Rice vampire-themed novels, has been moved to March 25. In July 2006, a new translation of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner will be presented by at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Public Theater’s summer season. Directed by George C. Wolfe it will feature Meryl Streep. Author and former Out Traveler editor Matt Link is launching a new travel magazine in conjunction with the Sherman’s Travel organization. After 10 years at the helm of Philadelphia Gay News, editor Patti Tihey says goodbye to the weekly newspaper. Window Media President William Waybourn has stepped down as president of the newspaper chain. Peter Polimino will be the new President. Author Greg Herren has started a regular column on writing for Erotica Readers & Writers Association website. Greg was also recently mentioned on the floor of the Virginia state legislature in an attempt by state Republicans to ban GSA alliances in high schools. Despite the controversy over the unmasking of author J.T. LeRoy, San Francisco publisher Last Gasp is moving ahead with their next LeRoy work, Labour, a novella illustrated by Australian artist Cherry Hood. Scribner and Pocket Books will publish Blind Fall, the upcoming novel from Christopher Rice, in early 2008. The new book deals with an Iraq veteran searching for redemption following the brutal murder of a comrade he betrayed. Rose MacMurray’s The Distant Strains of Thunder, a coming of age novel about a girl’s friendship with Emily Dickinson, will be published by Little, Brown. Courtney Love’s Dirty Blonde, journals and photos, is forthcoming from Farrar Straus & Giroux. Editors Christopher Anderson and Alecia Oleyourryk’s are on board for Boink: The Book, forthcoming from Warner books. Based on the controversial college magazine, a sex-positive, lifestyle publication, Boink: The Book will feature edgy narratives, prescriptive advice, provocative photos, and confessions from real college students. After 6 volumes of daily gay romance comic strips, Young Bottoms in Love, created by Tim Fish in August 2002, is coming to an end at the PopImage website. Howard Cruse, the renowned underground comix artist, drew the final webisode which debuted in February.
New Owner for Favorite Haunt: Kim Brinster, manager of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop for ten years, is now the owner of the bookstore. Brinster purchased the landmark Greenwich Village Bookshop at 15 Christopher Street on February 1, 2006 from Lambda Rising Bookstores. “It’s a thrill,” Brinster told Bookselling This Week. “I worked really hard to bring the store to where it is today, and I’m happy to know it’s mine. It’s played an historic role [in gay and lesbian history], and it’s so special to so many people.” “This is an exciting time for New York’s favorite and oldest gay bookstore,” said Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s owner, in a statement. “Three years ago, Oscar Wilde was in imminent danger of closing forever when, at literally the last hour, Lambda Rising stepped in to rescue the historic bookstore. In the time since, Lambda Rising, working closely with Kim Brinster and the New York store’s staff, has brought the store back from the brink and restored financially sound operations.” The Oscar Wilde Bookshop has been in continuous operation in Greenwich Village since 1967.
The Place to Be: The fourth annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival is moving forward as scheduled. The dates are May 12-14, 2006 in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2006 speakers and presenters include Achy Obejas, Martin Pousson, Karl Soehnlein, Radclyffe, Emanuel Xavier, and many others. This year there will be sessions led by Michelle Tea, Steven Saylor, and Greg Herren. For more information, visit www.sasfest.com. Pink Ink, the Publishing Triangle’s queer book festival in New York City, returns June 9-11, 2006. A reading series and twelve workhops and panels are being planned. Visit www.publishingtriangle.org for more details and updates.
Kudos: Alan Bennett has been nominated as Author of the Year in the British Book Awards. Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part is a nonfiction nominee for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award. Authors Greg Wharton and Simon Sheppard were short-listed for the Rauxa prize for best erotic short story. Karla Jay received the Distinguished Faculty Award at the Tenth Annual Dyson Distinguished Achievement Awards, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University. Ellen DeGeneres and her daytime talk show were nominated for 11 daytime Emmys. Brokeback Mountain was named Queer Favorite Feature Film on the recent voting on The Derek and Romaine Show heard on Sirius OutQ. At the British Academy awards (BAFTAs), Brokeback Mountain was honored for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. Ang Lee won Best Director honors and Jake Gyllenhaal was named Best Supporting Actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman won for Best Actor for Capote. Brokeback Mountain was also cited for Best Adapted Screenplat by the Writers Guild of America.
Open calls: Eric Summers is editing an anthology of erotica based on original superheros for STARbooks Press. Deadline is December 31, 2006. For guidelines and submissions, visit the Starbooks Press Web site or e-mail Eric at eric@starbookspress.com. Nominations for the 2006 Rauxa Prize Award are due by August 15, 2006. Given annually to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality, the award carries a prize of $1000. Visit the Web site for more details. This year an additional prize for erotic poetry will be awarded and carries a $300 prize.
Play it Again, Ben: Gay composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote the music for a 1937 English broadcast that included the W. H. Auden poem “Roman Wall Blues,” about a disillusioned soldier on guard duty in the northern extremes of the ancient empire. The recently uncovered score is set to be displayed in England at the Aldeburgh Festival in June and perhaps performed next year at the Sage Gateshead concert hall, near Newcastle, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the broadcast and the centenary of the birth of Auden, The Guardian of London reported. The search for the score was initiated by John Mapplebeck, a filmmaker whose company plans a project about the broadcast. Fifteen years after his newspaper appeal for information proved fruitless, Mapplebeck happened to mention his search to Philip Pendrel-Smith, a retired banker whom he drives to evensong every Sunday. Pendrel-Smith, once an actor, was involved in the original broadcast and picked up and kept the music after the airing. The score has been sent to the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. “It’s a treasure,” said the librarian, Chris Grogan.
Passages: Octavia Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence in the United States as a science fiction writer, died February 25, 2006. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home. The lesbian writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could take only a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park. Butler began writing at age 10, embracing science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl From Mars and thinking she could write a better story. In 1970 she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich. Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the U.S. South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was published last fall. In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.
New Owner for Favorite Haunt: Kim Brinster, manager of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop for ten years, is now the owner of the bookstore. Brinster purchased the landmark Greenwich Village Bookshop at 15 Christopher Street on February 1, 2006 from Lambda Rising Bookstores. “It’s a thrill,” Brinster told Bookselling This Week. “I worked really hard to bring the store to where it is today, and I’m happy to know it’s mine. It’s played an historic role [in gay and lesbian history], and it’s so special to so many people.” “This is an exciting time for New York’s favorite and oldest gay bookstore,” said Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s owner, in a statement. “Three years ago, Oscar Wilde was in imminent danger of closing forever when, at literally the last hour, Lambda Rising stepped in to rescue the historic bookstore. In the time since, Lambda Rising, working closely with Kim Brinster and the New York store’s staff, has brought the store back from the brink and restored financially sound operations.” The Oscar Wilde Bookshop has been in continuous operation in Greenwich Village since 1967.
The Place to Be: The fourth annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival is moving forward as scheduled. The dates are May 12-14, 2006 in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The 2006 speakers and presenters include Achy Obejas, Martin Pousson, Karl Soehnlein, Radclyffe, Emanuel Xavier, and many others. This year there will be sessions led by Michelle Tea, Steven Saylor, and Greg Herren. For more information, visit www.sasfest.com. Pink Ink, the Publishing Triangle’s queer book festival in New York City, returns June 9-11, 2006. A reading series and twelve workhops and panels are being planned. Visit www.publishingtriangle.org for more details and updates.
Kudos: Alan Bennett has been nominated as Author of the Year in the British Book Awards. Martin Moran’s The Tricky Part is a nonfiction nominee for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award. Authors Greg Wharton and Simon Sheppard were short-listed for the Rauxa prize for best erotic short story. Karla Jay received the Distinguished Faculty Award at the Tenth Annual Dyson Distinguished Achievement Awards, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences at Pace University. Ellen DeGeneres and her daytime talk show were nominated for 11 daytime Emmys. Brokeback Mountain was named Queer Favorite Feature Film on the recent voting on The Derek and Romaine Show heard on Sirius OutQ. At the British Academy awards (BAFTAs), Brokeback Mountain was honored for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. Ang Lee won Best Director honors and Jake Gyllenhaal was named Best Supporting Actor. Philip Seymour Hoffman won for Best Actor for Capote. Brokeback Mountain was also cited for Best Adapted Screenplat by the Writers Guild of America.
Open calls: Eric Summers is editing an anthology of erotica based on original superheros for STARbooks Press. Deadline is December 31, 2006. For guidelines and submissions, visit the Starbooks Press Web site or e-mail Eric at eric@starbookspress.com. Nominations for the 2006 Rauxa Prize Award are due by August 15, 2006. Given annually to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality, the award carries a prize of $1000. Visit the Web site for more details. This year an additional prize for erotic poetry will be awarded and carries a $300 prize.
Play it Again, Ben: Gay composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote the music for a 1937 English broadcast that included the W. H. Auden poem “Roman Wall Blues,” about a disillusioned soldier on guard duty in the northern extremes of the ancient empire. The recently uncovered score is set to be displayed in England at the Aldeburgh Festival in June and perhaps performed next year at the Sage Gateshead concert hall, near Newcastle, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the broadcast and the centenary of the birth of Auden, The Guardian of London reported. The search for the score was initiated by John Mapplebeck, a filmmaker whose company plans a project about the broadcast. Fifteen years after his newspaper appeal for information proved fruitless, Mapplebeck happened to mention his search to Philip Pendrel-Smith, a retired banker whom he drives to evensong every Sunday. Pendrel-Smith, once an actor, was involved in the original broadcast and picked up and kept the music after the airing. The score has been sent to the Britten-Pears Library in Aldeburgh. “It’s a treasure,” said the librarian, Chris Grogan.
Passages: Octavia Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence in the United States as a science fiction writer, died February 25, 2006. She was 58. Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home. The lesbian writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could take only a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park. Butler began writing at age 10, embracing science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl From Mars and thinking she could write a better story. In 1970 she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich. Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the U.S. South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was published last fall. In 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
February Publishing Notes
The buzz: Performer and writer Sandra Bernhard has signed a deal with Q Television to co-host 40 episodes of the Queer Edge With Jack E. Jett talk show. The network is also negotiating with Bernhard to develop her own series. Rosie O’Donnell is partnerning with novelist Alice Hoffman to write a sitcom pilot about an Erma Bombeck-like humorist. Director Philip Kaufman will film a movie about bisexual director Nicholas Ray titled I Was Interrupted. David Fincher will direct Torso, a thriller based on the graphic novel by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko. Miramax Films acquired the distribution rights to The Night Listener, the film adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s novel starring Robin Williams. The film rights to Tom House’s debut novel, The Beginning of Calamities have been optioned. Excerpts of his new novel Career Day, are forthcoming in Antioch Review and Ninth Letter. Hollywood director Roland Emmerich has pledged $150,000 to help support gay and lesbian film preservation through Outfest, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the largest gift in the organization’s 24 year history. Fourth Estate will publish Christopher Ross’s Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend, in the fall of 2006. Author Stephen Greco is serializing his novel Dreadnought, about a fictional American corporation, through Amazon.com. The six interrelated stories parts are available through Amazon Shorts. Greco is also Executive Director of the Ferro-Grumley Awards, which will be presented at the 17th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, Thursday, May 11, in New York City. Pink Ink, the Triangle’s gay book expo, is scheduled for June 9-11 in New York City.
Lambda Literary Update: Teresa DeCrescenzo has joined the Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation. So far, the Foundation has raised almost $15,000 since December 1, 2005. The Lambda Literary Awards this year will be in May in Washington, D.C., and again in conjunction with Book Expo. The Lambda Book Report will return as a quarterly publication this spring, providing reviews of LGBT books, as well as interviews, features, and lists of resources for the LGBT literary community.
Kudos: The American Library Association has announced the 2006 Stonewall Book Awards. The Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature went to Abha Dawesar, for Babyji, a coming-of-age tale about a free-spirited lesbian teenager in New Delhi. The Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction went to Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the ’70s in San Francisco, a look at the life of disco singer Sylvester James. The awards will be presented at the 2006 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June. Other honorees in the literature category include Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, and The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D’Allesandro, edited by Kevin Killian. In the nonfiction category, honorees include My One-night Stand With Cancer by Tania Katan, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 by Matt Houlbrook, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays by Larry Kramer (Tarcher/Penguin). Gay Scottish writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award for The Accidental. Brokeback Mountain was named picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America. The film also won Best Drama and Best Screenplay from the Golden Globes and Ang Lee was named Best Director by the Directors Guild of America. The film also received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, and nine BAFTA nominations, including Best Film. Brokeback Mountain and Capote were also among GLAAD Media Award nominations for Outstanding Film - Wide Release and for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild. Capote was named the Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics. The movie also won the 18th annual University of Southern California Scripter Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for his performance as the author and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Mysterious Skin, the film adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film - Limited Release.
Open calls: Editor and author Toby Johnson is looking for inspiration fiction, anecdotes, and essays of positive aspects of gay experience and faith for a new anthology to be titled Charmed Lives: Spinning Straw into Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story. The anthology will be published by Lethe Press. Deadline is July 1, 2006. Email tobyjohnso@aol.com for moredetails.
Queer Foundation: The newly-formed Queer Foundation is offering three $1,000 college scholarships to winners of a high school English essay contest. The theme of the 2006 competition is homelessness. The collected essays will help form curriculum materials for use in high schools to benefit LGBTQ students. The awarded scholarships will be for studies in queer theory or a related field at a U.S. college or university. The Queer Foundation is a nonprofit corporation and 501(c)(3) public charity located in Seattle, Washington. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information of an application form, visit http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/queerfoundation/.
Beat Hotel: The spirit of William S. Burroughs lives on in a small hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California, where a month-long 92nd birthday celebration kicks off on February 4th. The Beat Hotel is just a ten-minute drive from Palm Springs and was renovated in 2003 to celebrate the life and work of Burroughs. Each of the eight guestrooms is decorated with photos and artwork by the author, Beat era furniture, and a vintage typewriter. There is also an onsite library featuring various works and first editions of the Beat Generation. Neil Woodburn of the traveler’s weblog, www.Gadling.com, recently posted that the hotel is based upon the original “Beat Hotel” in Paris, at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, where, between 1957-1963 Burroughs, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat artists lived. Burroughs wrote most of Naked Lunch at the Parisian hotel, while Ginsburg penned his famous poem, Kaddish. (The Parisian hotel is now called Relais Hotel du Vieux and still accepts guests.) Burroughs 92nd Birthday Festivities at The Beat Hotel’s InterZone Beat Festival include a Harold Chapman photography exhibition, performances by Husker Du singer/songwriter Grant Hart, slide shows, and various book exhibitions.
A month of literary scandals: So much has been written and discussed elsewhere that I only have to mention a few names for anyone to know what I am referring to: James Frey, JT LeRoy, Nasdijj. A month of literary scandals. Boom! Wham! Pow! And each with some sort of queer connection. Let’s start with LeRoy, or should we say Laura Albert, a 40-year-old middle class white woman from Brooklyn, NY, and Savannah Knoop, a twentysomething wannabe model who hoodwinked an agent, publishers, critics, celebrities, and the book-buying public into believing they were a transgender, HIV-positive writer. And Frey? While every reporter on the beat was ready to shoot down A Million Little Pieces for its embellishments, the word still seems to be out about the gay title character on Frey’s follow-up book, My Friend Leonard. And Nasdijj? The Navajo memoirist turned out to be none other than gay-erotica writer Timothy Patrick Barrus (who is married to a woman and father of a daughter). And the impact of all this fiction in fact is only just beginning to be seen. St. Martin’s Press recently added a sticker to the dedication page of the advance readers’ copies of Augusten Burrough’s latest book, Possible Side Effects: True Stories, to be released in May. It says: “Author’s Note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well.” According to the New York Post gossip column Page Six, St. Martin’s also added disclaimers to Burroughs’s other books, including Running with Scissors and Dry.
Passages: Betty Berzon, pioneer gay rights activist, psychotherapist, and writer, died January 24, 2006. She was 78. She was the founder of Southern California Women for Understanding, as well as co-founder of California Gay Academic Union. She was a founding board chair of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and board member of numerous gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, including the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where she developed a gay and lesbian peer counselor training program; Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation where she created the personal growth program that resulted in the book, Positively Gay (1979); National Gay Rights Advocates, the first public interest law firm to focus on gay rights, and the Community Guild, a groundbreaking effort to assist low-income gay and lesbian seniors. She was also producer of Gaythink, the first national conference to bring together gay and lesbian faculty and students. In 1971, during a UCLA conference called “The Homosexual in America,” Berzon became the first psychotherapist in the country to publicly declare herself as a gay mental health professional. An expert in small group process, Berzon worked with renowned researcher Evelyn Hooker to develop a series of encounter groups for gays and lesbians, called the Quest for Love. Later, she developed a series for Bell and Howell called The Encountertapes, a growth program for leaderless groups, which led to her first edited book, Encounter Groups: First Facts. Berzon practiced psychotherapy with groups and couples for the last twenty-five years of her life, during which time she also wrote four more books, including the best-selling Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships that Last (1988); The Intimacy Dance: A Guide to Long-Term Success in Gay and Lesbian Relationships (1996); Setting Them Straight : You CAN Do Something About Bigotry and Homophobia in Your Life (1996); and Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best autobiography in 2003. Berzon is survived by her partner of thirty-three years, Teresa DeCrescenzo. Also survived by her sister, Dr. Stephanie Miller of Lancaster Ohio; stepmother, Trude Berzon of Des Moines Iowa and North Palm Beach, Florida; stepsister Barbara Kaplan of North Palm Beach, Florida; cousins Sidney, Shirley, Jerry, Sandy, Mary, Dan, and Abbe Wool; and eight nieces and nephews. Teresa DeCrescenzo has requested that donations may be made in Betty’s honor to the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and Lambda Literary Foundation.
Anyda Marchant, a retired attorney, novelist and publisher, died January 11, 2006 at her home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She was 94. Ms. Marchant was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, moving with her family to Washington, DC, at age six. After earning her undergraduate degree and, in 1933, her law degree from what is now George Washington University, she was admitted to practice in DC and Virginia, before the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. She was one of the first female attorneys with the law firm now known as Covington and Burling. She served briefly in private practice and with the U.S. Commerce Dept. before moving to the legal department of the World Bank where she worked for 18 years until her 1972 retirement. In 1972 Marchant and her life partner Muriel Crawford created the Naiad Press with Barbara Grier and Donna McBride. The first novel published by Naiad was Marchant’s The Latecomer, written under the pen name Sarah Aldridge. In 1974, Naiad was formally incorporated, proceeding to publish eleven Sarah Aldridge novels, as well as a wide selection of other feminist and lesbian writers, including Jane Rule, Isabel Miller, Ann Bannon, and Sarah Schulman, among many others. Marchant served as Naiad’s president from its inception until the mid 1990’s. In 1995 Marchant and Crawford founded their own publishing company, A&M Books of Rehoboth Beach. A&M published the last three Sarah Aldridge novels (the latest in 2003), along with the book As I Lay Frying - a Rehoboth Beach Memoir by author Fay Jacobs. Passionate about supporting feminist writers, Marchant continued her publishing and mentoring activities until very recently, highlighted by the October 2005 release of the novel Celebrating Hotchclaw by feminist literary icon Ann Allen Shockley. Marchant is survived by Crawford, her partner of 57 years, as well as a large circle of loving friends. A Donations may be made in Marchant’s name to CAMP Rehoboth, Compassionate Care Hospice, or All Saints Episcopal Church Building Fund (all located within Rehoboth Beach, Delaware).
Tory Dent, an award-winning poet who was diagnosed with HIV at age 30, later developed AIDS and wrote three volumes of poetry about her years of coping with her illness, died December 30, 2005 at her home in New York City. She was 47. In lengthy poems made up of unusually long lines, Dent traveled through the maze of doctors, hospitals and treatments that filled close to 20 of her 47 years. She referred to her AIDS diagnosis as “my life totaled in an indifferent instant to a disappointing sum.” Dent explored her physical and emotional reality in graphic detail in her three volumes of poetry What Silence Equals (1993), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), and Black Milk (2005). HIV, Mon Amour won the James Laughlin Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Delaware, she graduated from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University. Besides poetry, Dent wrote critical essays and reviews for several literary and art journals. She contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from her college boyfriend, a hemophiliac who later died of AIDS. Nine years later she was diagnosed with AIDS. She married Sean Harvey in 1999. In addition to him, she is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Melissa.
Lambda Literary Update: Teresa DeCrescenzo has joined the Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation. So far, the Foundation has raised almost $15,000 since December 1, 2005. The Lambda Literary Awards this year will be in May in Washington, D.C., and again in conjunction with Book Expo. The Lambda Book Report will return as a quarterly publication this spring, providing reviews of LGBT books, as well as interviews, features, and lists of resources for the LGBT literary community.
Kudos: The American Library Association has announced the 2006 Stonewall Book Awards. The Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature went to Abha Dawesar, for Babyji, a coming-of-age tale about a free-spirited lesbian teenager in New Delhi. The Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction went to Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the ’70s in San Francisco, a look at the life of disco singer Sylvester James. The awards will be presented at the 2006 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June. Other honorees in the literature category include Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, The First Verse by Barry McCrea, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, and The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D’Allesandro, edited by Kevin Killian. In the nonfiction category, honorees include My One-night Stand With Cancer by Tania Katan, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 by Matt Houlbrook, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, and The Tragedy of Today’s Gays by Larry Kramer (Tarcher/Penguin). Gay Scottish writer Ali Smith won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award for The Accidental. Brokeback Mountain was named picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America. The film also won Best Drama and Best Screenplay from the Golden Globes and Ang Lee was named Best Director by the Directors Guild of America. The film also received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay, and nine BAFTA nominations, including Best Film. Brokeback Mountain and Capote were also among GLAAD Media Award nominations for Outstanding Film - Wide Release and for Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild. Capote was named the Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics. The movie also won the 18th annual University of Southern California Scripter Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman won a Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild award for his performance as the author and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. Mysterious Skin, the film adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film - Limited Release.
Open calls: Editor and author Toby Johnson is looking for inspiration fiction, anecdotes, and essays of positive aspects of gay experience and faith for a new anthology to be titled Charmed Lives: Spinning Straw into Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story. The anthology will be published by Lethe Press. Deadline is July 1, 2006. Email tobyjohnso@aol.com for moredetails.
Queer Foundation: The newly-formed Queer Foundation is offering three $1,000 college scholarships to winners of a high school English essay contest. The theme of the 2006 competition is homelessness. The collected essays will help form curriculum materials for use in high schools to benefit LGBTQ students. The awarded scholarships will be for studies in queer theory or a related field at a U.S. college or university. The Queer Foundation is a nonprofit corporation and 501(c)(3) public charity located in Seattle, Washington. Deadline is April 1, 2006. For more information of an application form, visit http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/queerfoundation/.
Beat Hotel: The spirit of William S. Burroughs lives on in a small hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California, where a month-long 92nd birthday celebration kicks off on February 4th. The Beat Hotel is just a ten-minute drive from Palm Springs and was renovated in 2003 to celebrate the life and work of Burroughs. Each of the eight guestrooms is decorated with photos and artwork by the author, Beat era furniture, and a vintage typewriter. There is also an onsite library featuring various works and first editions of the Beat Generation. Neil Woodburn of the traveler’s weblog, www.Gadling.com, recently posted that the hotel is based upon the original “Beat Hotel” in Paris, at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur, where, between 1957-1963 Burroughs, Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat artists lived. Burroughs wrote most of Naked Lunch at the Parisian hotel, while Ginsburg penned his famous poem, Kaddish. (The Parisian hotel is now called Relais Hotel du Vieux and still accepts guests.) Burroughs 92nd Birthday Festivities at The Beat Hotel’s InterZone Beat Festival include a Harold Chapman photography exhibition, performances by Husker Du singer/songwriter Grant Hart, slide shows, and various book exhibitions.
A month of literary scandals: So much has been written and discussed elsewhere that I only have to mention a few names for anyone to know what I am referring to: James Frey, JT LeRoy, Nasdijj. A month of literary scandals. Boom! Wham! Pow! And each with some sort of queer connection. Let’s start with LeRoy, or should we say Laura Albert, a 40-year-old middle class white woman from Brooklyn, NY, and Savannah Knoop, a twentysomething wannabe model who hoodwinked an agent, publishers, critics, celebrities, and the book-buying public into believing they were a transgender, HIV-positive writer. And Frey? While every reporter on the beat was ready to shoot down A Million Little Pieces for its embellishments, the word still seems to be out about the gay title character on Frey’s follow-up book, My Friend Leonard. And Nasdijj? The Navajo memoirist turned out to be none other than gay-erotica writer Timothy Patrick Barrus (who is married to a woman and father of a daughter). And the impact of all this fiction in fact is only just beginning to be seen. St. Martin’s Press recently added a sticker to the dedication page of the advance readers’ copies of Augusten Burrough’s latest book, Possible Side Effects: True Stories, to be released in May. It says: “Author’s Note: Some of the events described happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Some of the individuals portrayed are composites of more than one person and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed as well.” According to the New York Post gossip column Page Six, St. Martin’s also added disclaimers to Burroughs’s other books, including Running with Scissors and Dry.
Passages: Betty Berzon, pioneer gay rights activist, psychotherapist, and writer, died January 24, 2006. She was 78. She was the founder of Southern California Women for Understanding, as well as co-founder of California Gay Academic Union. She was a founding board chair of Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and board member of numerous gay and lesbian advocacy organizations, including the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, where she developed a gay and lesbian peer counselor training program; Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation where she created the personal growth program that resulted in the book, Positively Gay (1979); National Gay Rights Advocates, the first public interest law firm to focus on gay rights, and the Community Guild, a groundbreaking effort to assist low-income gay and lesbian seniors. She was also producer of Gaythink, the first national conference to bring together gay and lesbian faculty and students. In 1971, during a UCLA conference called “The Homosexual in America,” Berzon became the first psychotherapist in the country to publicly declare herself as a gay mental health professional. An expert in small group process, Berzon worked with renowned researcher Evelyn Hooker to develop a series of encounter groups for gays and lesbians, called the Quest for Love. Later, she developed a series for Bell and Howell called The Encountertapes, a growth program for leaderless groups, which led to her first edited book, Encounter Groups: First Facts. Berzon practiced psychotherapy with groups and couples for the last twenty-five years of her life, during which time she also wrote four more books, including the best-selling Permanent Partners: Building Gay and Lesbian Relationships that Last (1988); The Intimacy Dance: A Guide to Long-Term Success in Gay and Lesbian Relationships (1996); Setting Them Straight : You CAN Do Something About Bigotry and Homophobia in Your Life (1996); and Surviving Madness: A Therapist’s Own Story, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best autobiography in 2003. Berzon is survived by her partner of thirty-three years, Teresa DeCrescenzo. Also survived by her sister, Dr. Stephanie Miller of Lancaster Ohio; stepmother, Trude Berzon of Des Moines Iowa and North Palm Beach, Florida; stepsister Barbara Kaplan of North Palm Beach, Florida; cousins Sidney, Shirley, Jerry, Sandy, Mary, Dan, and Abbe Wool; and eight nieces and nephews. Teresa DeCrescenzo has requested that donations may be made in Betty’s honor to the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services and Lambda Literary Foundation.
Anyda Marchant, a retired attorney, novelist and publisher, died January 11, 2006 at her home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. She was 94. Ms. Marchant was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, moving with her family to Washington, DC, at age six. After earning her undergraduate degree and, in 1933, her law degree from what is now George Washington University, she was admitted to practice in DC and Virginia, before the U.S. Court of Claims and the U.S. Supreme Court. She was one of the first female attorneys with the law firm now known as Covington and Burling. She served briefly in private practice and with the U.S. Commerce Dept. before moving to the legal department of the World Bank where she worked for 18 years until her 1972 retirement. In 1972 Marchant and her life partner Muriel Crawford created the Naiad Press with Barbara Grier and Donna McBride. The first novel published by Naiad was Marchant’s The Latecomer, written under the pen name Sarah Aldridge. In 1974, Naiad was formally incorporated, proceeding to publish eleven Sarah Aldridge novels, as well as a wide selection of other feminist and lesbian writers, including Jane Rule, Isabel Miller, Ann Bannon, and Sarah Schulman, among many others. Marchant served as Naiad’s president from its inception until the mid 1990’s. In 1995 Marchant and Crawford founded their own publishing company, A&M Books of Rehoboth Beach. A&M published the last three Sarah Aldridge novels (the latest in 2003), along with the book As I Lay Frying - a Rehoboth Beach Memoir by author Fay Jacobs. Passionate about supporting feminist writers, Marchant continued her publishing and mentoring activities until very recently, highlighted by the October 2005 release of the novel Celebrating Hotchclaw by feminist literary icon Ann Allen Shockley. Marchant is survived by Crawford, her partner of 57 years, as well as a large circle of loving friends. A Donations may be made in Marchant’s name to CAMP Rehoboth, Compassionate Care Hospice, or All Saints Episcopal Church Building Fund (all located within Rehoboth Beach, Delaware).
Tory Dent, an award-winning poet who was diagnosed with HIV at age 30, later developed AIDS and wrote three volumes of poetry about her years of coping with her illness, died December 30, 2005 at her home in New York City. She was 47. In lengthy poems made up of unusually long lines, Dent traveled through the maze of doctors, hospitals and treatments that filled close to 20 of her 47 years. She referred to her AIDS diagnosis as “my life totaled in an indifferent instant to a disappointing sum.” Dent explored her physical and emotional reality in graphic detail in her three volumes of poetry What Silence Equals (1993), HIV, Mon Amour (1999), and Black Milk (2005). HIV, Mon Amour won the James Laughlin Award given by the Academy of American Poets. Born Victorine Dent in Wilmington, Delaware, she graduated from Barnard College in 1981 and earned a master’s degree in creative writing at New York University. Besides poetry, Dent wrote critical essays and reviews for several literary and art journals. She contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from her college boyfriend, a hemophiliac who later died of AIDS. Nine years later she was diagnosed with AIDS. She married Sean Harvey in 1999. In addition to him, she is survived by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Melissa.
Friday, December 30, 2005
January 2006 Publishing Notes
The buzz: Two years ago, South African author Nadine Gordimer gathered twenty of her friends and fellow writers to publish Telling Tales, a collection of short stories whose proceeds would go to HIV/AIDS organizations. In December 2005, she presented a cheque for R1,449,248 to the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). Among the forthcoming books at Suspect Thoughts Press are Sweet Son of Pan, a collection of poetry by Trebor Healey, and A History of Barbed Wire, a collection of short stories by Jeff Mann. In the fall of 2006, Da Capo will publish Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage by journalist David Valdes Greenwood, about a gay couple’s ten-year relationship and the adoption of their baby girl. A Parisfal, a play by the late Susan Sontag, will premiere in February at Performance Space 122 in the East Village. Author-playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein has been signed for a half-hour show for the Fox network. Among the movies set to premiere at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival are The Night Listener, an adaptation of the Amistead Maupin novel starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette, and Freida Lee Mock’s Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, a portrait of the openly gay Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. After a devastating fire in 2004, Spartacus Books in Vancouver has re-opened at 319 West Hastings, next door to the store’s original site. A new gay bookstore has opened in Paris: Librairie Altérité at 9 rue des Gâtines in the 20th arrondissement. And Lambda Literary Foundation Board member Katharine Forrest’s recent letter to Books To Watch Out For indicated that there may be new life yet for the Lambda Book Report. Stay tuned.
Kudos: Author and composer Ned Rorem received a Grammy nomination in the category of Classical Contemporary Composition for the recording of Nine Episodes for Four Players (Contrasts Quarter). Author Maureen McHugh is one of the three finalists for The Story Prize, for her collection of 13 stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, published by Small Beer Press. The prize will be announced January 25, 2006 and the winning author receives $20,000. The finalists for the 2005 ISO Violet Quill Award are Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, Bilal’s Bread by Sulayman X, A Really Nice Prom Mess by Brian Sloan, Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate, Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, and The First Verse by Barry McCrae. The film version of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain received Best Picture nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, as well as seven Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture. It’s also landed on numerous Top 10 lists including those from the American Film Institute, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Online. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to collect praise for his title role in Capote. The actor has received acting nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Online, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Forth Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Toronto Film Critics Association, and a nomination from the Golden Globes.
Open calls: Deadline for submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2007 is April 15, 2006. Richard Labonté is the series ongoing editor and Timothy J. Lambert is this year’s judge. E-mail submissions to: bge2007@gmail.com. Rachel Kramer Bussel and Christopher Pierce are editing three anthologies for Alyson: What Lies Beneath: Erotic Stories about Underware and Lingerie, The Sexiest Soles: Erotic Stories About Feet and Shoes, and Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage. Deadline is January 15, 2006 for all three books. E-mail submissions to rachelkb@gmail.com and christopherpierce2001@yahoo.com. Starbooks Press is back in action and looking for submissions to several new anthologies: Deadline for Muscle Worshipers, edited by Eric Summers, is February 1, 2006. Email eric@starbookspress.com. Summers is also editing the anthology Love in a Lock-Up for Starbooks. Deadline is August 30, 2006. E-mail submissions to eric@starbookspress.com. Cleis Press is looking for stories for several anthologies. Tom Graham is editing Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. Deadline for submissions is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to CowboysBook@aol.com. Cleis is also looking for submissions for After Midnight: True Lesbian Sex Confessions. Deadline is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to AfterMidBook@aol.com. Johnny Hansen is editing Trucker Sex: True Gay Erotica for Cleis. Deadline is February 1, 2006. E-mail submissions to TruckersBook@aol.com. Cleis is also inaugurating Best Gay Romance 2007. Deadline is February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestGayRomance@aol.com. For Best Lesbian Romance 2007, deadline is also February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestLesbian@aol.com. Lethe Press is looking for submissions for Tales from the Den: Wild and Weird Stories for Bears. Deadline is March 31, 2006. E-mail submissions to lethepress@aol.com
Passages: Hallam Tennyson, the great-grandson of British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was found stabbed to death at his North London home in December 2005. The body of Tennyson, 85, a former BBC executive, was found by a former partner. Several newspapers reported that Tennyson led a “flamboyant and “colorful lifestyle,” often inviting men back to his apartment up to three times per week. In 1998, Tennyson, writing about his sexual orientation, said, “Lord Tennyson, my great-grandfather, lived from 1809 to 1892 and would, no doubt, be absolutely horrified by me. He was a sexual prude, whereas I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to sex.” Tennyson, survived by two children and seven grandchildren, was married for 30 years and was up-front with his wife about his sexual orientation. “I told Margo before we married that I was a homosexual, but she did not know what that meant,” he wrote. “I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t mind. Looking back, we were terribly rational about it. I went to see a psychiatrist, who told me, quite ridiculously, that it was just a passing phase and that the love of a good woman could change me.” Tennyson also penned an autobiography in 1984 (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Volumes 1 and 2), discussing a gay-bashing incident as well as his many trysts: “Instead of spending hours haunting public lavatories or other pick-up points, I might have read several books as long as War and Peace—I might even have written one.”
Kudos: Author and composer Ned Rorem received a Grammy nomination in the category of Classical Contemporary Composition for the recording of Nine Episodes for Four Players (Contrasts Quarter). Author Maureen McHugh is one of the three finalists for The Story Prize, for her collection of 13 stories, Mothers & Other Monsters, published by Small Beer Press. The prize will be announced January 25, 2006 and the winning author receives $20,000. The finalists for the 2005 ISO Violet Quill Award are Setting the Lawn on Fire by Mack Friedman, Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann, Bilal’s Bread by Sulayman X, A Really Nice Prom Mess by Brian Sloan, Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate, Acqua Calda by Keith McDermott, and The First Verse by Barry McCrae. The film version of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain received Best Picture nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, as well as seven Golden Globe nominations, including Best Picture. It’s also landed on numerous Top 10 lists including those from the American Film Institute, National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Online. Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to collect praise for his title role in Capote. The actor has received acting nods from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Online, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Forth Worth Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the Toronto Film Critics Association, and a nomination from the Golden Globes.
Open calls: Deadline for submissions for Best Gay Erotica 2007 is April 15, 2006. Richard Labonté is the series ongoing editor and Timothy J. Lambert is this year’s judge. E-mail submissions to: bge2007@gmail.com. Rachel Kramer Bussel and Christopher Pierce are editing three anthologies for Alyson: What Lies Beneath: Erotic Stories about Underware and Lingerie, The Sexiest Soles: Erotic Stories About Feet and Shoes, and Secret Slaves: Erotic Stories of Bondage. Deadline is January 15, 2006 for all three books. E-mail submissions to rachelkb@gmail.com and christopherpierce2001@yahoo.com. Starbooks Press is back in action and looking for submissions to several new anthologies: Deadline for Muscle Worshipers, edited by Eric Summers, is February 1, 2006. Email eric@starbookspress.com. Summers is also editing the anthology Love in a Lock-Up for Starbooks. Deadline is August 30, 2006. E-mail submissions to eric@starbookspress.com. Cleis Press is looking for stories for several anthologies. Tom Graham is editing Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. Deadline for submissions is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to CowboysBook@aol.com. Cleis is also looking for submissions for After Midnight: True Lesbian Sex Confessions. Deadline is January 10, 2006. E-mail submissions to AfterMidBook@aol.com. Johnny Hansen is editing Trucker Sex: True Gay Erotica for Cleis. Deadline is February 1, 2006. E-mail submissions to TruckersBook@aol.com. Cleis is also inaugurating Best Gay Romance 2007. Deadline is February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestGayRomance@aol.com. For Best Lesbian Romance 2007, deadline is also February 25, 2006. E-mail submissions to BestLesbian@aol.com. Lethe Press is looking for submissions for Tales from the Den: Wild and Weird Stories for Bears. Deadline is March 31, 2006. E-mail submissions to lethepress@aol.com
Passages: Hallam Tennyson, the great-grandson of British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was found stabbed to death at his North London home in December 2005. The body of Tennyson, 85, a former BBC executive, was found by a former partner. Several newspapers reported that Tennyson led a “flamboyant and “colorful lifestyle,” often inviting men back to his apartment up to three times per week. In 1998, Tennyson, writing about his sexual orientation, said, “Lord Tennyson, my great-grandfather, lived from 1809 to 1892 and would, no doubt, be absolutely horrified by me. He was a sexual prude, whereas I’ve always been very liberal when it comes to sex.” Tennyson, survived by two children and seven grandchildren, was married for 30 years and was up-front with his wife about his sexual orientation. “I told Margo before we married that I was a homosexual, but she did not know what that meant,” he wrote. “I explained it to her, but she said she didn’t mind. Looking back, we were terribly rational about it. I went to see a psychiatrist, who told me, quite ridiculously, that it was just a passing phase and that the love of a good woman could change me.” Tennyson also penned an autobiography in 1984 (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, Volumes 1 and 2), discussing a gay-bashing incident as well as his many trysts: “Instead of spending hours haunting public lavatories or other pick-up points, I might have read several books as long as War and Peace—I might even have written one.”
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
