Band of Thebes

Batwoman Is a Lesbian in Upcoming Comic Book

Now that Bruce Wayne is dead, DC Comics is bringing back Kathy Kane and her alter ego, Batwoman. As writer Greg Rucka told Comic Book Resources:

"Yes, she's a lesbian. She's also a redhead. It is an element of her character. It is not her character. If people are going to have problems with it, that's their issue. Frankly, she should be judged on her merits."

True enough. What I don't know about comic books is everything. This could be ultra-awesome, or it could be the kind of fake lesbianism designed to turn men on. JH Williams III's drawings are cool. (How much do you love that cat in the background by her boot?) More spreads on Rucka's blog.

Real life lesbian superhero Rachel Maddow chose Rucka's comic series Queen and Country as her pick for the Buzz Board. She called him "a genius," his series "fantastic," and its heroine Tara Chace "one of the all-time great/tragic action characters."

Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

In fourteen novels for young readers and seven picture books, Jacqueline Woodson has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included glbtq characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, loves pizza, hates artichokes, named her daughter for the singer Toshi Reagon who happens to be the girl's godmother, and she doesn't believe in writer's block. Yesterday's ALA list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her most recent novel, After Tupac and D Foster, about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers.

ALA's 2009 List of the Best LGBT Books for Children and Young Adults

While politically gay issues may seem stuck from sixteen years ago, and Hollywood is tiptoeing backwards, one area that has seen a quantum leap forward is lgbt books for teenagers and children. If you haven't had your sweeping statement yet today, this is the first time in human history you could find such a range of titles. From picture books for preschoolers to YA novels for children to graphic novels for late teens, every level of storytelling offers a wide range of lgbt lives. Two gay dads in Montana raising a str8 sk8r punk? Yeah, whatevs. Latina baby dyke? Of course. Teen drag queen at conservative all boys academy? OMG YES!!! Japanese-Canadian teen goth Wiccan lesbian in older-younger relationship? I can't believe you're making me say it, but, okay, yes, alright? Gay male penguins raising their own chick? You betcha.

Now, the American Library Association has just released its second list of the best recently published lgbt books for children and young adults. Their selection of over thirty titles includes four of "exceptional quality" that are highly recommended:

10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert, Illustrated by Rex Ray (Pre School - Gr. 2) Bailey dreams of wearing beautiful dresses, but her family disapproves of her understanding of her true self.

Down to the Bone by Mayra Lazara Dole (Gr. 8-12) After sixteen-year-old Laura is outed at school, kicked out of her home, and rejected by her girlfriend, she finds herself and her community in this hilarious debut novel with an all-Latino cast.

The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon (Gr. 9-11) Skateboarder Ben and his two dads move to rural Montana where Ben absolutely does not fit in and finds it harder to deal with having two dads than he did in their previous urban home.

Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki  (Gr. 9-12) Would-be Wiccan and goth Skim, aka Kimberly Keiko Cameron, is revealed in this graphic novel as a sometimes target for the popular students at her all-girls private school in Toronto, where she falls in love with her English teacher Ms. Archer.

Another encouraging aspect of this list is that the people who made it are everywhere. Committee members represent Reno NV, Kansas City MO, Madison WI, Lawrence KS, Chicago IL, Oakland CA, Brooklyn NY, Houston TX, Newport OR, and Grand Prairie TX.

Their 2008 list featured among its recommended titles of exceptional quality one of my favorite novels of last year, Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You due in paperback this April.

Kindle 2

We're trendsetters and early adopters, so if you're thinking about getting a Kindle 2, which finally will be released on February 24, please consider buying it via my link. I still like books, but I want one for traveling.

Holy cow. The new Kindle is only 1/3" thick and can read aloud anything on its screen. So when you're hooked but absolutely positively must stop reading to makeout cook or shower or do your crunches, it will pick up where you left off and talk you through the next chapter. (Robot voice for now, but it's only a matter of time.) 

Ah, but you just don't want to read on a screen. I can only say that when I'm in Alaska, I read The New Yorker online and if the writing is good, you're lost in the author's scene and unaware of how you got there. Also, by far my most literary, old-fashioned bookish friend loves her Kindle and strongly urges everyone to buy one. 

Born February 11: Tammy Baldwin

Who is the only Baldwin better than Alec? Tammy. Technically, she was the first openly gay person elected to Congress in U.S. history. (Before her, Gerry Studds, Barney Frank, Jim Kolbe, and Steve Gunderson were elected as closeted men, were forced out by ignoble circumstances or came out, and except for Gunderson were re-elected as openly gay incumbents.) With her victory in 1998, Baldwin also became the first out lesbian in Congress and the first woman elected to Congress from Wisconsin. Despite anti-gay smear campaigns by her Republican opponents, she has won each of her most recent four elections by two-to-one margins. Representing Madison, she voted against the Iraq invasion in 2003, and she cosponsored two separate resolutions to impeach Cheney and Gonzales. She has been progressive at least since she was nine in 1971, when her mother married a black man and Tammy was struck by the injustice of what became a frequent occurrence, suspicious white adults stopping her stepfather to ask what he was doing with a blond, blue-eyed little girl. This year she and her partner Lauren Azar celebrate their thirteen anniversary. Last week Balwdin led the call for Hillary Clinton to correct the State Department's unequal treatment of LGBT employees. In her confirmation hearings Clinton promised to study the matter. Baldwin had made the same request of Condi Rice, who did nothing. Michael Guest, the openly gay ambassador to Romania, resigned over the department's discriminatory policies in Novemeber 2007.

Brad Gooch on Rauschenberg and Johns' "Screen Door" Closet

Jolted by Milk, Brad Gooch offers a short essay, The Art of Gay Cool, about the chill closeted generation just before Harvey's outward heat. His leaps across decades and stretches to connect subjects may be a bit random but some interesting ideas shine through:

When I first arrived in Manhattan in 1971, such don’t-ask-don’t-tell art was all the rage. John Ashbery bristled at being identified as a gay poet; Elizabeth Bishop refused to be included in anthologies of women’s poetry. We were on the cusp of Rauschenberg-cool and Milk-hot. But the durable allure of Rauschenberg and Johns, their coded love and art, is not just cranky nostalgia. When I spoke with bad-boy artist Francesco Vezzoli—his art-market spoof “GREED, A New Fragrance by Francesco Vezzoli” opened at Rome Gagosian this week—he said, “To me, Rauschenberg and Johns are mythological as two serious, strong people, sharing ideas, and creating work together. I find that deeply inspiring. And I see very little around today. We are living in such a plus-one world.”

Known for his early novels and his biography of Frank O'Hara, Gooch will publish Flannery: A Life later this month.

Born February 10: Bill Tilden

Although he disliked sports growing up in Philadelphia and didn't make the team on his first try at Penn, Bill Tilden became a tennis legend, easily the sports' greatest player in his lifetime and as famous nationally as Babe Ruth. In 1920 he was the first American to win a Wimbledon singles championship, and he won the US singles seven times, doubles five times, and mixed doubles four times. A feat that has never been matched is Tilden's leading the US team to seven consecutive Davis Cup championships. He finally turned pro in 1931 and earned half a million dollars in six years. The never-married Tilden's homosexuality was an open secret, as was his preference for teenagers. He traveled with his own ball boys. As he aged he is said to have become more brazen about those relations; or maybe he wasn't more obvious, maybe people were simply less inclined to look the other way once he was a has-been.

In November 1946 he and a fourteen year-old hustler were parked in Beverly Hills when a policeman saw him and arrested him. Although Tilden wrongly believed his status and celebrity friendships with the likes of Charlie Chaplin would protect him, he was only charged with a misdemeanor (contributing to delinquency) rather than a felony (lewd and lascivious with a minor). He was sentenced to a year in jail and served seven months. In January 1949 Tilden picked up a sixteen year old hitchhiker and did it again. Again he could have faced felony charges but was only charged with violating his probation. Again he was sentenced to a year in prison and served ten months.

Within months of his second release, in 1950 AP conducted a nationwide poll of sportswriters to determine the greatest athletes of the half-century in each sport. Overwhelmingly they voted the twice disgraced Tilden #1 in tennis, by a wider margin than any other athlete earned. He was increasingly, though not entirely, shunned on the country club circuit. Isn't it odd to think of the dawn of the McCarthy era as a time of less self-righteousness about separating one's private mistakes from professional achievements?

Compare those poll results with -- coincidentally -- yesterday's USA Today sports section, which quoted an excerpt of Larry King's discussion with Yankees manager Joe Torre. Larry asked if Joe thought a baseball player could ever be openly gay. (Not twice convicted of molesting minors just openly gay.) Torre replied:

Well that’s a great question, I don’t know. But I just hope that an active player, if that’s the case, can feel free to do that. That’s all I can say. But I don’t know. Obviously, you have 25 players in the clubhouse, and, you know, it’s going to be tough for everybody to feel as maybe I do. But I’d like to believe our country is turning in that direction.

Cowardly times. And not just in America. Yesterday also saw the announcement of adorable Aussie  Matthew Mitcham's very first endorsement deal five months after winning his gold medal in diving. He was the only out gay man competing in last summer's Olympics. Even after his success he cannot afford to train fulltime. (FYI, Mitcham believes the bad economy, not homophobia, is responsible for his lack of sponsors.)

Tilden died at sixty in 1953 with a net worth of $88.13. He had squandered his fortune investing in bad Broadway shows, some of which he starred in. He also wrote popular tennis manuals, and some unsuccessful novels, though his most enduring spot in literature is his cameo in Lolita. Contrasting Humbert Humbert's heterosexual underage love is a gay former star "with a harem of ball boys" whose name is Ned Litam. Typical of Nabokov's endless wordplay, spelled backwards that's Ma Tilden.

Born February 9: Alice Walker

Born to sharecroppers in Georgia in 1944, Alice Walker felt out of place in the South. When she was eight her brother shot her with a BB gun, leaving her right eye blind, and the doctor who operated on her swindled her parents. She escaped to Spelman, where she studied with Howard Zinn, then transferred to Sarah Lawrence, but after graduating in 1965 she went to Mississippi to work for civil rights. Two years later, on St. Patrick's Day in New York City, she married a liberal, white, Jewish lawyer named Mel Leventhal. They moved to Jackson, Mississippi and had a baby. The Klan gave them death threats. They divorced after nine years.

Male violence and exploitation of women have been frequent themes in Walker's thirty books of poems, stories, novels, and nonfiction, as have women's triumphs by forging strong, supportive relationships with one another, including lesbian love. The apotheosis of this is, of course, her immediate classic The Color Purple, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Steven Spielberg's adaptation was largely degayed and introduced the world to Oprah Winfrey. It was nominated for eleven Oscars and won zero. Exactly twenty years later, Oprah produced the musical version on Broadway. It was nominated for eleven Tonys and won one. The novel endures, and still incites: According to the ALA, it ranked 18th on the list of books patrons most frequently seek to ban from libraries.

Like Susan Sontag, Walker is an outspoken critic of social injustice who chooses to concentrate her energies on current topics other than gay issues and rarely discusses her own same-sex relationships. Given her towering stature, especially with black women, longtime California resident Walker might have been a significant force against Prop 8. She was already out. In 2006, she finally spoke about dating Tracy Chapman, saying, "it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody's business but ours." As for Chapman, she titled her 2000 album Telling Stories, three verses of which are:

There is fiction in the space between
You and reality
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane
There is fiction in the space between
You and me

Leave the pity and the blame
For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between

There is fiction in the space between
You and everybody
Give us all what we need
Give us one more sad sordid story
But in the fiction of the space between
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
Sometimes a lie is the best thing

That's mild compared to Rebecca Walker's feelings about her "self-absorbed" parents, who, after their divorce, traded her back and forth at two year intervals. Rebecca shared some anger in her highly praised memoir Black, White, and Jewish. Mother and daughter are vividly estranged.

Tim Fish at New York Comic Con

Comic book purists may balk at the growing dominance of video games at comic conventions, but Fruit Brute over at Gay Gamer ["for boys who like boys who like joysticks!"] is amped for the list of featured titles this weekend at New York Comic Con.

It's on my radar because Tim Fish is scheduled to sign books at the booth for Poison Press, which describes itself as "a teeny, tiny publishing house offering gay and gay-friendly comics, TPBs, OGNs, and what-not." If you haven't been following Fish's comics online, in Bay Windows or DOM, or his graphic novel, since the debut of his immortally titled Young Bottoms in Love, you can catch up with his anthology Cavalcade of Boys, or jump right into the brand new volume four, Love is the Reason.

Last month Paul Morton at Bookslut posted an interview with Fish in which they discussed the pros of self-publishing, the cons of self-promoting, the melancholy aspects of his younger characters, the vampiric quality of his sugar daddy, body culture in Southern California and idealization in comics, the lack of real jobs in gay storylines, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, among other pressing topics. Read it.

A speeding glance reveals the lineup of people at NY Comic Con includes: Art Spiegelman, Chip Kidd, David Hajdu, Chuck D, DMC, McG, Bill Plympton, JJ Sedelmaier, Milo Ventimiglia, Seth Green, Lou Ferrigno, Peter Mayhew (at 7'3" he played Chewbacca), and Joss Whedon.

Among the premiere films / clips are WONDER WOMAN, WATCHMEN, YATTERMAN, TERMINATOR SALVATION, and the first fifty minutes of Pixar's newest "unlikely" hit, UP! about the friendship between a 78 year-old grump and 8 year-old goof as they float away in a house pulled by thousands of helium balloons.

Born February 7: Mark Tewksbury

To avoid facing up to being gay, which he had realized in elementary school, Mark Tewksbury poured all of his energy into swimming. Some of his junior high school classmates guessed his secret, vandalized his locker and scrawled anti-gay slurs. Without coming out to them, Mark told his parents about the attack, who told the principal, whose solution was that Mark should change schools. When boys at his new school discovered why he had transferred, they made his life worse. He considered suicide. Swimming remained a salvation and by the time he was seventeen he was one of the best in Canada. At the 1988 Olympics when he was twenty, he won a silver medal for relay and placed fifth in backstroke. At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, he won the gold and broke the world record for 100m backstroke. He was twenty-four, still closeted even to his family, and showered with honors: He was named Canada's male athlete of the year, he appeared on the cover of Time, and he was inducted into three halls of fame. At the very end of 1998, two months before he turned thirty-one, he finally came out and lost lucrative speaking engagements and endorsements for being "too gay." He resigned from the Olympic Committee over their cronyism and lack of accountability, and later he was a founding member of the Gay & Lesbian International Sports Association [GLISA] which sponsored the 2006 Outgames in Montreal and will host this summer's Outgames in Copenhagen. During the Beijing Olympics he covered swimming for CBC. Read his book Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock.

The New Yorker on James Baldwin's Wanderings

In this week's anniversary issue, Claudia Roth Pierpont examines James Baldwin's nomadic life in a 6,100-word essay, ostensibly a book review, though James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile isn't mentioned until 3,300 words into the piece. Much of the essay is strong, especially the legacy of anger in the Richard Wright/ father/ restaurant episodes. And although Pierpont attributes most of Baldwin's exile to racial strife, and artistic angst, she doesn't avoid gay issues.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus, in December, 1955, Baldwin was absorbed with the publication of his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room”; he watched from Paris as the civil-rights movement got under way, that spring. His new book had a Paris setting, no black characters, and not a word about race. Even more boldly, it was about homosexual love—or, rather, about the inability of a privileged young American man to come to terms with his sexuality and ultimately to feel any love at all. Brief and intense, the novel is brilliant in its exploration of emotional cowardice but marred by a portentous tone that at times feels cheaply secondhand—more “Bonjour Tristesse” than Gide or Genet. Although Baldwin had been cautioned about the prospects of a book with such a controversial subject, it received good reviews and went into a second printing in six weeks. As a writer, he had won the freedom he desired, and the decision to live abroad seemed fully vindicated.

The book is 416 pages and costs $89.95.

Speaking of the recession, The New Yorker's ad pages were down 27% last year. (Industrywide, the average drop was 12%.) Totally unrelated, The New Yorker just got a new publisher, Lisa Hughes, who has been publisher of Condé Nast Traveler since 1995. I think it should have been wunderkind Will Lippincott.

Born February 6: Ramón Novarro, CF

When rival movie studios wanted their own Valentino, their solution was to promote Ramón Novarro, Hollywood's first Mexican star, as the original "Latin Lover." Born José Ramón Gil Samaniego in Durango, Mexico in 1899 his family fled the Mexican Revolution and settled in Los Angeles, where by the time Ramón was eighteen he was appearing in silent films. In 1923 he became a leading actor in Scaramouche, and when he was twenty-six he played the title role in Ben Hur, which created a sensation with its very short tunics. (Watch this clip to see him like a geek at a Roman circuit party, suddenly reunited with a friend who has become buff: He can't keep his hands off the guy's arms.)  Novarro went on to star opposite Joan Crawford (Across to Singapore), Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy (The Barbarian), and Greta Garbo (Mata Hari), but he only dated men and he refused to enter a sham marriage just for publicity's sake. One of his dashing boyfriends was the adventurer Richard Haliburton, who built his famous house in Laurel Canyon to be near Novarro. At his peak in the 1920s and 30s, Novarro earned $100,000 per movie. When he was no longer young enough to play the boyish lover, MGM opted not to renew his contract, and he lived comfortably off his savvy real estate investments. In 1968, when he was sixty-nine, he hired two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, to have sex with him but they only went to his house in hopes of robbing him of a giant stash of cash. Upon realizing there was no hidden fortune, they killed him and left with twenty dollars.

He's mighty.

NYT on One of "100 Below-the-Radar Lesbian Communities" in U.S.

Just in time to celebrate Iceland's Johanna Sigurdardottir becoming the world's first openly gay prime minister at sixty-five, the NYT has a story about womyn-only lesbian utopias throughout North America. The article focuses specifically on Alapine, Alabama where twenty womyn aged fifty to seventy-five live now and fifteen more own plots of land on which they intend to build houses. The self-identified radical feminist separatist lesbians endured a lot of trauma, from the 1950s to the 70s and onward (including a witch hunt and dismissal from the army in 1963), and they've come to see the outside world as a male place full of violence. In response, they've created communities of peace.

“Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world,” said Ms. Hall, who retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. “And women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple.”

“I don’t have curtains,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about someone watching me dress or undress. There’s also a sense of community, a sense of supporting each other.”

Ms. Hall added: “It’s not as competitive. Women, when they’re together, tend to be more cooperative. They don’t look for one to succeed and all the others to fail. In the mainstream world that’s what it is. Somebody has to be on top so everyone else has to be on the bottom.”

and

“To me, this is the real world,” [Winnie Adams] said. “And it’s a very peaceful world. I don’t hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, ‘It’s another glorious day on the mountain.’ Men are violent. The minute a man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be around those dynamics.”

Somehow the quotes make them seem strident, so please, please take time to listen to their own voices in the audio slideshow alongside the article. They sound wonderful -- spirited, warm, and thoughtful. And, it may surprise you to learn, they say their rural Baptist Alabama neighbors "take care of us" and have been "beyond good to us."

Their chief problem is that the communities may become extinct. Younger lesbians don't want to isolate themselves there. Seven of the two-acre plots are still available at $25,000 each.

It's understandable if you missed this story: The Times ran it in Fashion & Style.

Born February 5: William S. Burroughs

Around 1930, when he was sixteen, William S. Burroughs was expelled from the New Mexico high school where he was keeping a journal of his make out sessions with another boy and taking chloral hydrate, thereby cementing the major themes of his life: writing, drugs, gay sex, travel, and trouble with authorities. Twenty years later, fleeing a drug arrest in Louisiana, Burroughs established himself in Mexico with his common law wife Joan. Drunk, he and Joan thought it would be a good idea to re-enact the William Tell escapade, but rather than shooting the apple he killed his wife. The tragedy seemed to jolt Burroughs into action, and in 1953 with the help of Allen Ginsberg he published his first novel, Junky. He wandered in South America, then Palm Beach, then New York City, then Rome, then Tangier, where he lived in a gay brothel and experimented with new drugs and new styles of writing. One result was that in 1958 the Chicago Review published sections of Naked Lunch, immediately called obscene. The U.S. Postal Service ruled copies could not be sent through the mail. The controversy got the full novel published in 1959, and in 1960 Massachusetts was the first state to prosecute on grounds of obscenity. Six years later, in the nation's last case obscenity case involving only words, not images, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled the novel was not obscene. Although Burroughs had been the cover story of Life magazine, and championed by critics like Mary McCarthy, he continued to struggle for another twenty years. Finally in the 1983 Ginsberg succeeded in nominating Burroughs to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1984 literary agent Andrew Wylie began to represent Burroughs, procuring a deal for Queer, Burroughs' unpublished novel from 1953 and a contract for six additional books. Burroughs appeared in Gus van Sant's 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, and in 1991 David Croenenberg filmed a much praised adaptation of Naked Lunch starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis. He died in 1997.

Among the many artists who consider Burroughs to be an important influence on their work are: Peter Ackroyd, Laurie Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Charles Bukowski, Angela Carter, Kurt Cobain, Dennis Cooper, Ian Curtis, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Ken Kesey, John Rechy, and Patti Smith. As for Burroughs, he said the greatest influence on his own writing was the shy and delicate Englishman Denton Welch.

Mehmet Murat Somer's Gay Trans Camp Turkish Crime Novels

Formerly an engineer, a banker, and now a management consultant in Istanbul, Mehmet Murat Somer wanted to write crime novels set in his native Turkey starring a worldly and witty trans detective. As he explains, "By day computer whiz, handsome man, corporate consultant and a skillful hacker; by night hip-underground club owner, glamorous and sexy transvestite, amateur sleuth with an Audrey Hepburn alter-ego."

Still bristling over the Silence of the Lambs psycho trans, Somer told the Guardian, "Not only in Turkey, but in many countries, transgender people are presented in a way that I don't like at all. They are either slapstick, half-brained characters to be laughed at, or people with no moral values. My aim with the books was to do what Pedro Almodóvar does - turn the negatives into positives."

He also wants to keep things upbeat: "Lots of the crime novels I encounter are grim, horrifying, brutal. I don't want to see much blood. I don't want to see harsh feelings. I like light things like champagne or bubblegum. I wanted to write something with joy, that readers could enjoy. Even with the darkest things that I write, I wanted to give them lightness - so the books have brilliant colors."

If that rings your (highly sensitized) Fluffy Fiction Alarm, his list of favorite authors should reassure you. Above all others is Balzac, then Patricia Highsmith, Orhan Pamuk, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, Ingrid Noll, Perihan Magden, Mary Renault, Mika Waltari, and Gore Vidal. You could do a lot worse.

He wrote The Kiss Murder first, then The Prophet Murders, and a third (The Gigolo Murders), before any was published. Penguin has brought them out in reverse order. And for the record, no, he is not a transvestite.

Oscar Wilde Bookshop To Close March 29

A reader named Chris just sent news that after forty-one years in New York, the world's oldest lgbt bookstore is closing on March 29.

Current owner Kim Brinster told the NYT that since August the shop has weathered monthly double digit declines in sales compared to a year ago. With the ideal Wilde epigram, she posts this message on the company website:

"There is no truth comparable to Sorrow.
There are times when Sorrow seems to me to be the only truth."

It is with a sorrowful heart that after 41 years in business the Oscar Wilde Bookshop will close its doors for the final time on March 29, 2009. We want to thank all of our customers for their love and loyalty to the store over the years. You have helped make this store a world wide destination and all of us at the store have enjoyed welcoming our neighbors whether they are next door or half way around the world.

In 1967 Craig Rodwell started this landmark store that not only sold Gay and Lesbian literature but also became a meeting place for the LGBT community. Over the years it grew into a first-rate bookshop thanks to the loyal, smart and dedicated staff. There are not enough words to thank these dedicated booksellers for making the OWB one of the world’s finest LGBT bookstores. I feel very honored to have gotten to work with them.

Unfortunately we do not have the resources to weather the current economic crisis and find it’s time to call it a day. So thanks to all who have been a part of the Oscar Wilde family over the years, you have truly been a part of a great global community.

Radical Faeries Want Your Writing for 30th Anniversary Anthology

Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson will co-edit an anthology of writing to celebrate thirty years of Radical Faeries. They say:

We are interested in your experience of the Radical Faeries and their gatherings no matter if it was attending one of the first gatherings or one that just happened last week.

Submissions can include personal experiences, academic “think pieces,” or writings about the impact of the Faeries on gay culture.

We are interested in how the Radical Faeries touched your mind, body, and spirit and contributed to your development as a gay man.

How did your consciousness change because of the Radical Faeries?

Are the Radical Faeries still relevant to gay men’s lives in 2009?

Deadline for submissions is July 1, 2009, or three days after Pride. You might want to start early.

Although submissions can be any length, a 2,500 word maximum is suggested. Send your entries as an attached Word Document to either MarkThompson52 [at] aol.com or donkilhefner [at] sbcglobal.net. 

Photo by Mark Thompson/Drkrm (Wolfcreek, Oregon 1987)

Born February 3: Gertrude Stein

Minor painter Dora Carrington gets a biopic but not colossus Gertrude Stein? It's nonsensical, especially as Stein's life is so cinematic: Pittsburgh, parents' death, Baltimore, Radcliffe, Paris from 1903 to 1946 with sidetrips everywhere. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when coining the name the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Stein and Toklas, two Jewish lesbians after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D., in 1903, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at seventy-two. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise.

The American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards 2009

 
The ALA has announced this year's winners of the Stonewall Book Awards in fiction and nonfiction, as well as finalists in both categories.

Taking the top prize for his first novel Light Fell, Evan Fallenberg was also recently a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction. His book tells the story of a fifty year old man reunited with his five sons after leaving them and their mother twenty years earlier to pursue an affair with a brilliant rabbi. The three runners-up are A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer, The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue, and The Conversion by Joseph Olshan.

The nonfiction award went to William Eskridge Jr. for his Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003. Eskridge teaches at Yale Law School. His work was a foundation to the Lawrence v. Texas victory overturning U.S. sodomy laws. This is his third book on gay legal matters. The other finalists in the nonfiction category are Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating with My Dad by Bob Morris; Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster by Joanne Passet; Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South by E. Patrick Johnson; Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever by Joel Derfner.

The ALA Stonewall Awards are the "first and most enduring awards for LGBT books." They also have an excellent track record recently, having just honored in fiction Ellis Avery, Andrew Holleran, Abha Dawesar, and Colm Tóibín, and, for nonfiction, Mark Doty, Alison Bechdel, Joshua Gamson, Joan Roughgarden, and John D'Emilio.

Just Published: Basketball Jones by E. Lynn Harris

For all the talk of black voters' homophobia in the wake of Prop 8, let's remember that it is straight black women who have boosted E. Lynn Harris's gay books high onto the New York Times bestseller lists eleven times. (Certainly Lynn has a wide gay readership, but not enough to make him a significant bestseller.)

Last week, Doubleday released his twelfth book, Basketball Jones, about an NBA player on the DL. Dray Jones and AJ Richardson have been in love for years, ever since college. But when Dray's teammates begin to taunt him, he quickly marries Judi an ambitious woman who will use any secret to her own advantage. Unabashedly a commercial fiction writer, Lynn has mastered the winning formula of strong characters facing tough choices in luxury surroundings, with plenty of divas, drama, hidden passions, heartbreak, perseverance, and the ultimate truth of homespun life lessons.

Shouldn't Lifetime, OWN, BET, or Bravo be adapting these books for tv movies?

Tonight Harris will read at the Afro American Bookshop in New Orleans. If you live in Austin, Fort Worth, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Denver, or Tulsa consider going to see him in the coming weeks. Exact dates here. I worked at Doubleday during several of his books and can say no novelist works harder with more sincerity to promote his work. He self-published his first novel and sold ten thousand copies in beautyshops around Atlanta. Seeing him live is a treat.