LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Lesbian and gay erotica in new Swing anthology out today in print

2009-07-01T22:00:00.001-07:00

Swing! Adventures in Swinging by Today's Top Erotica Writers is a new collection of swinging stories by 25 of today's top erotica writers. The book is out in print today.

In a collection of swinging stories, along with straight couples, one would expect a fair amount of bisexual women. After all, bisexual women have long been a staple of the American swinging scene. However, Swing! also contains a few stories that are entirely lesbian or gay.

A teen book burns at the stake

2009-06-22T15:45:00.000-07:00

Francesca Lia Block, an award-winning author of young-adult books (the "Weetzie Bat" series among them), has known for a while now that one of her novels, Baby Be-bop (Dangerous Angels)is at the center of a controversy in West Bend, Wis.

A few days ago, she found out that it might be burned at the stake. "Baby Be-bop (Dangerous Angels)" is on a list of titles that a local group calling itself the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries objects to seeing in the public library. In February, the group asked the library's board to remove a page of recommended titles about gay and lesbian issues for young people (including "Baby Be-Bop") from the library's Web site. Then they demanded that the books be moved from the youth section of the library and placed with the adult collection, "to protect children from accessing them without their parents' knowledge and supervision."

"My publisher brushed it off at first," Block said, "but now it's starting to look really serious." When the board refused to immediately comply with the requests of West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries, the town's common council voted not to renew the contracts of four recalcitrant board members. A second group, West Bend Parents for Free Speech, formed to oppose the plan to segregate the books.

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A teen book burns at the stake

Salon

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'Playing for My Life�

2009-06-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR

A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played

By Marshall Jon Fisher

Illustrated. 321 pp. Crown Publishers. $25

One afternoon in late July 1937, an American redhead and a German aristocrat graced the noble lawn of Wimbledon, spinning an unforgettable spectacle. Tennis was never so civilized � or so it seemed.

Don Budge, the son of a truck driver from California, and his friend Baron Gott�fried von Cramm, a dashing blond, dueled toward dusk in the last match of the Davis Cup semifinal held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. At stake was more than national pride.

�On this still-peaceful English summer day, the swastika is flying high over Center Court, along with the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes,� Marshall Jon Fisher writes in his new book, �A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played.� �Nazi officials are sipping tea with the queen in the Royal Box.�

A lot of tea gets sipped between points in this book (even by the players). This quaint detail belies the anxiety of this five-set thriller and puts readers at the edge of their seats � sometimes right next to Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan, friends of Budge.

At 22, Budge was No. 1 in the world, on his way to becoming a superstar. The 28-year-old von Cramm, No. 2, feared he was on his way to a Nazi prison � or worse. Von Cramm�s coach, the �fading American hero� Bill Tilden, was unsure where he was going.

Fisher depicts the intersection of their careers amid the simmering world conflict, juxtaposing history and sport in an absorbing but uneven narrative that does not always live up to the match�s billing.

Budge�s and Tilden�s stories have been told elsewhere, so they work better as support for a nuanced portrait of von Cramm. A �gallant� and �gracious� man revered for his sportsmanship, von Cramm was Germany�s second-most-celebrated athlete, behind the boxer Max Schmeling. But he harbored a secret: he was gay.

His Jewish doubles partner had fled Germany; so had his Jewish lover. In the months leading up to the match, von Cramm was interrogated by the Gestapo about his homosexual activities, was barred from playing singles in the French Championships, divorced his wife and lost the Wimbledon final for the third straight year (to Budge, no less).

He refused to join the Nazi Party; tennis success was his only shield. �I�m playing for my life,� von Cramm told Tilden, who kept his own homosexuality a less guarded secret. Fisher shows how, with unflinching generosity, von Cramm stoically endured his tribulations.

See Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest ... New York Times - Marshall Jon Fisher

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LARRY KRAMER: Review: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

2009-06-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform
by Charles Upchurch
University of California Press; (April 22, 2009), 288 pages

This is a very important book. It may even be a historic book, one with which gay history can arm itself with more sufficient factual veracity as to start vanquishing at last the devil known as queer studies. Queer studies is that stuff that is taught in place of gay history and which elevates theory over facts because its practitioners, having been unsuccessful in uncovering enough of the hard stuff, are haughtily trying to make do.

Well, here is a healthy dose of the hard stuff. Charles Upchurch, an assistant professor of history at Florida State University, and an American, has spent ten years of his life researching this book. It shows it. It overflows with case after case of hard, factual, irrefutable evidence that Englishmen did with other Englishmen pretty much what same-sex couplings do with each other all over the world to this day. The big difference here is that Upchurch begins his extraordinary documenting of these cases with the early nineteenth century, i.e. 1800 onward, heretofore not known as a time in history where such undeniable facts have made themselves known in such a crystal-clear way. (Upchurch reports to have collected over 1000 published newspaper articles documenting cases.)

Certainly nothing like this has appeared in America, thus allowing queer and gender studies to pretty much swamp, nay drown, the gay history field with their gobbledygook theorizing of what might have happened. This ludicrous state of affairs prohibits making statements such as: "they did then what we do now," without the wrath of queer theorists raining down insults of an uncommonly vitriolic nature. You don't have a right to say that! say they. You can't prove it! say they. It's been here all along since the beginning of history, say many others of us. Well now it can be said, and proved, in Britain at any rate, thanks to Upchurch. Indeed, "an aching gap has been filled," British sexual theorist Jeffrey Weeks, proclaims in one of the blurbs on the back cover. Indeed.

One reads this book with grateful amazement. Here is a scholar, an academic, who has really done his homework. He has read, it would seem, almost every applicable British newspaper and court record from the early 1800's until about 1870. The amazing thing, of course, when his "findings" are excavated and exposed to the bright air of daylight, it can be seen that all this information has been there since it was created, in the files of The Times, in the court records of cases that The Times and other papers reported, quite often rather non-judgmentally, it is also interesting to note. Men accused of sodomy, attempted sodomy, of "indecent assault," at various times punishable by death, of cross dressing, of hustling, of cruising, of trying to set up house, of cohabiting in any way, of trying just to say Hello, oh all those things that gay men know all about and take for granted today.

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LARRY KRAMER: Review: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

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THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE

2009-06-18T00:40:00.000-07:00

THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE

A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World

By James Davidson.

Random House. 789 pp. $45

Enthralling if overlong, "The Greeks and Greek Love" is written in part as a counterblast to Kenneth Dover's classic "Greek Homosexuality" (1978), which has been deeply influential in contemporary cultural studies. Dover argued that same-sex relationships among males in ancient Greece focused on sodomy, and that the submissive role was deeply humiliating. By contrast, the aggressive or dominant partner could freely engage in any amount of episodic sex without serious consequences to his career or reputation.

For Davidson, a professor of classics and history at the University of Warwick, this model leaves much to be desired and overlooks one important fact: actual love, the devotion of a couple to each other. He stresses that Dover -- and his followers, who included Michel Foucault -- proffered a vision of eros that ignores affection and true partnership. "By equating being in love with having sex, by confusing Greek sex with Greek Love, a courting couple with a couple in a relationship, Dover not only sexualized passionate eros, but made homosexual relationships look intrinsically impermanent, and by the same token trivial." Though Davidson never says it outright, "The Greeks and Greek Love" tacitly validates modern same-sex marriage, just as Dover's older study now seems to reflect the pre-AIDS era of promiscuous casual sex.

In the first section of his book, Davidson focuses on the meaning of Greek erotic terminology and Athenian sexual mores. His starting text is "The Symposium," Plato's classic dialogue on love. In particular, he focuses on the speeches of Pausanias, who describes the elaborate Athenian courtship ritual between admirer (erastes) and admired (eromenos). Here Davidson overturns the typical view of Greek love as a kind of pedophilia, an older male (the erastes) forcing his brutal attentions on a young boy (the eromenos).

In fact, a family's sons were carefully protected in Athenian society, and it was taboo for any unrelated man even to talk privately to them. Instead, sanctioned love affairs focused not on the pubescent but on 18- or 19-year-olds, young males who were neither boys nor full-fledged adults. Davidson dubs this group "striplings." As puberty seems to have set in four or five years later than it typically does today, these striplings would still be attractively beardless -- Greek men didn't trim their facial hair -- and at the acme of their masculine beauty. Their devotees were generally only a few years older than they were and often behaved with the giddiness of a modern fan club. Rather than being aggressors, groups of infatuated erastai (plural of erastes) would essentially worship a youthful heartthrob from a distance, writing poems, sighing heavily and frequently offering gifts.

In this Greek system, Davidson explains, eros ran in one direction: The besotted admirer, who "just can't help himself," did all the work while the hard-to-get beloved maintained his distance and apparent indifference. Still, it was ultimately the eromenos's decision whether to favor any particular man. For the Greeks, such favoring (charizesthai) had to avoid even the hint of quid pro quo or commodification: To exchange sex for money or political advantage was prostitution, and that taint would wreck an entire life. Everything instead should be built on a kind of gracious giving. With luck, philia, "intimate love," a true bond, might result. All in all, the course of same-sex love was highly formalized, usually culminating in rituals that look a lot like marriage ceremonies. Quite often, Davidson concludes, Greek homosexuals led their entire lives as committed and faithful couples.

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THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE

Washington Post
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Christian group sues to burn gay teen novel

2009-06-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

In light of yesterday's post, I found that this article had ironic timing...
I saw this posted by a friend on Facebook. A religious group in Wisconson sues for the right to burn a young adult novel about a gay hero beause they found it "explicitly vulgar" and "anti-christian." The link for the article is here.
See Christian group sues to burn gay teen novel
Examiner.com
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"Double Bound" Wins Double Book Awards for Gay/Lesbian Fiction

2009-06-15T10:18:00.001-07:00

"Arthur, from Nick Nolan's award-winning novel "Strings Attached," has returned. He's long given up on finding love when he becomes bodyguard to handsome, wealthy Jeremy Tyler--teenage son of a man from Arthur's past. When Jeremy is kidnapped, Arthur must vanquish his demons to rescue him in "Double Bound" (ISBN 9781439207253, BookSurge Publishing, 2008).
"Double Bound" is the highly anticipated sequel to "Strings Attached," ForeWord Magazine's 2006 'Gay/Lesbian Book of the Year.' The story begins with Arthur Blauefee's anguish-filled youth, and moves to his career as a gay U.S. Marine. After suffering an unimaginable tragedy and being discharged under 'Don't Ask Don't Tell,' Arthur becomes bodyguard to Jeremy Tyler, whose father was Arthur's secret lover. As stoic mentor and dutiful protector, Arthur accompanies Jeremy and his boyfriend Carlo to a plush resort, financed by the Tyler family, on a tropical island in Brazil. But their luxurious surroundings will only be a veneer for the many traps awaiting them: sensual temptation, kidnapping, blackmail and ritualistic sacrifice.
Despite a deep attraction to Jeremy, Arthur's Marine background means he will never cross boundaries with the dazzling young stud--but Jeremy has less willpower than the muscular, mature Arthur: One afternoon, while Carlo is off visiting family, Jeremy takes his relationship with Arthur in a direction neither expect. But the afterglow of their pleasure is cast aside when Dom Fabiano--a slick, wealthy trickster--launches his own twisted plans for the young scion, which culminates in Jeremy's kidnapping, and an unlikely partnership between jealous Carlo and guilt-ridden Arthur.
Besides developing three-dimensional characters with authentic struggles, passions and fears, Nolan creates poignant storylines readers care deeply about: While Arthur races against time, he also fights with his past--a cruel father who abused him, and the deaths of the only two men he ever cherished--then discovers he cannot succeed without silencing his inner taunting voices; later, a shamed Arthur is willing to surrender his only possibility for happiness, until a humble woman, and her aged golden retriever, forever change the course of his life. Filled with heroes and villains, haunting scenes, blistering sensuality and stunning plot twists even the most astute readers won't expect, Nick Nolan's new page-turner leaves readers breathless as they rush toward the story's two--yes, two unforgettable climaxes.
Mr. Nolan states, "The title 'Double Bound' refers to Arthur's 'double bind' situations that only look unsolvable, because he's afraid to confront what torments his soul." Nolan adds, "Ultimately, 'Double Bound' is the suspenseful tale of redemption, passion and forgiveness that's wrapped around a man who eventually finds love, but only after bravely turning it away." After winning 'First Place' for Gay/Lesbian Fiction in 'Reader Views Literary Awards' and ForeWord Magazine's 'Book of the Year' Awards, "Double Bound" is poised to win even more fans.
About the AuthorNick Nolan is a Los Angeles native. After earning a degree in psychology, he directed a residential treatment facility for abused, homeless, and mentally ill GLBT teens, then became inspired to write after reading the awe-inspiring works of Paul Monette. Today, Nick and his partner Jaime divide their time between their home in Los Angeles and a cabin in the mountains. When not writing, Nick is usually walking the couple's two beloved dogs, cooking Jaime dinner (Jaime cleans up), or dreaming of owning a vintage mahogany Chris-Craft.
"Double Bound" (ISBN 9781439207253, BookSurge Publishing, 2008) can be purchased through local and online bookstores.

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Christian group sues for right to burn gay teen novel

2009-06-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

n a scene which appears to have been lifted straight out of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, a group of Christians in Wisconsin has launched a legal claim demanding the right to publicly burn a copy of a book for teenagers which they deem to be "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian".

The offending book is Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (�72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.

Their suit says that "the plaintiffs, all of whom are elderly, claim their mental and emotional well-being was damaged by this book at the library," and that it contains derogatory language that could "put one's life in possible jeopardy, adults and children alike."

"The word 'faggot' is very derogatory and slanderous to all males," the suit continues. "Using the word 'Nigger' is dangerously offensive, disrespectful to all people. These words can permeate violence." The suit also claims that the book "constitutes a hate crime, and that it degrades the community".

"They've filed a claim against the city of West Bend and the city has to decide if it is valid," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, acting director of the ALA's office for intellectual freedom. "Their insurance company is evaluating the claim, but I would be very surprised if they found any merit in it ... Should they find any merit in this claim, we would certainly support the library in fighting it."

The legal challenge follows a lengthy campaign by some West Bend residents to restrict access to teenage books they deemed sexually explicit from library shelves, which was eventually thrown out at the start of June.

"Obviously we were really pleased with the outcome to that � there was a unanimous vote to keep the books in the library and we thought the matter should be over," said Larry Siems, director of the Freedom to Write programme at PEN America.

Siems said there was clearly "a bit of theatre" in the lawsuit which followed. "They've filed a lawsuit which has little possibility of going forward legally, and they're asking for damages which include the right to burn a book. It does seem more to gain publicity than a real serious challenge." But, he said, PEN remained very concerned about the impulse behind the claim. "This is a group of people trying aggressively to rid the library of these books and that's very serious - it needs to be fought."

The claimants, he said, "have a right to continue to express their views, and this in a way is a creative attempt to express those views". But it's "also a dangerous game when you're talking about something like book burning, calling on the law to burn books. It's certainly completely un-American, and if they paused, I think they would agree."

It was not possible to reach the Christian Civil Liberties Union for comment.

See Christian group sues for right to burn gay teen novel guardian.co.uk

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Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in the gay community

2009-06-13T18:18:00.000-07:00

Harold Norse, a San Francisco poet often associated with the Beats, who was mentor or peer to many of the greatest talents in 20th century American literature, including Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, has died. He was 92.

Norse died of natural causes Monday at an assisted-living facility in San Francisco, according to his conservator, attorney Mark Vermeulen.

A pioneer of poetry written in plain American English who was called "the best poet of your generation" by William Carlos Williams, Norse never attained the recognition that he and others felt was his due. A literary beacon in the gay community who risked ostracism by writing openly of his sexual adventures in the 1940s and '50s, Norse exiled himself to Europe for 15 years before returning to the United States and publishing such volumes as "Hotel Nirvana" (1974), which was nominated for a National Book Award, "Carnivorous Saint" (1977) and "In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems" (2003).

"He was essentially an expatriate voice in American poetry," said Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and bookseller who published a volume of Norse's poems in the mid-1970s. "He had an original voice because he ventriloquized what a lot of other poets were saying. . . . He could sound in one poem like T.S. Eliot . . . or in another poem like William Burroughs."

Norse's life reads like a history of modern American literature. At a reading in 1939, he flirted with W.H. Auden and became his personal secretary, a job he held until Auden took up with Norse's lover. He met Ginsberg riding a New York subway in 1944, more than a decade before Ginsberg attained international notoriety with the Beat classic "Howl." Later, Norse caroused with Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin at the Parisian flophouse that became famous as the Beat Hotel.

Norse was born out of wedlock on July 6, 1916, in New York City and raised by his mother after his father disappeared. He earned a bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College in 1938 and a master's from New York University in 1951. The following year, his mentor, William Carlos Williams, arranged a reading for Norse at the Museum of Modern Art. His work appeared in prestigious publications, including Poetry magazine, the Paris Review and Saturday Review.
See Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in the ... Los Angeles Times -
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Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

2009-06-10T23:21:00.002-07:00

by Tim Pfaff

Poet C.P. Cavafy, circa 1889.



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My introduction to the poetry of C.P. Cavafy came when author Anne Lamott thrust a copy of the Edmund Keely-Philip Sherrard translation of the Collected Poems � the one to have then � into my hand and said something like, "Here," meaning "Eureka; read this." It crossed the Pacific with me and has remained a companion because, like the wider world I sought, Cavafy is less a text than a place you can inhabit.

That world just got bigger and better � and about how many other things can you say that these days? � with Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation of the Collected Poems and, in an equally important volume, The Unfinished Poems (Knopf). Although his new rendering of the poems will frequently make you gasp, it's not because Mendelsohn has made them prettier. He's given them back their sturdy skeletons and firm flesh.

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Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

2009-06-10T23:21:00.001-07:00

by Tim Pfaff

Poet C.P. Cavafy, circa 1889.



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Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

2009-06-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

by Tim Pfaff

Poet C.P. Cavafy, circa 1889.



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The Library Don't Have a Closet: 19 Graphic Novels for Gay & Lesbian Pride Month

2009-06-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

�There is a huge gay audience in comics as well as a big contingent of creators,� wrote DC Comics writer Marc Andreyko on ComicBookResources.com. With explicitly gay characters popping up in established superhero series, libraries could showcase comics for Gay and Lesbian Pride Month (June) by displaying only these titles. But that would be shortchanging patrons. Indeed, other, more individualistic titles with LGBT content have been so highly praised that your collection may have them already�and if not, they should have them. Take your pick from the variety @ The Library Don't Have a Closet: 19 Graphic Novels for Gay ...
Library Journal

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Pre-Gay LA: Battle scars Windy City Times

2009-06-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

Pre-Gay LA: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights, by C. Todd White, University of Illinois, 280 pages, paper, $25, cloth $75

If there seems to be one constant in the movement for LGBT rights, it is that we tend to suffer growing pains at regular intervals, evidenced by fights within organizations and between leaders. This has happened throughout Chicago's movement, and also nationally. Even within the modern movement for same-sex marriage rights, there are battles over strategy, money and power.

But if you were a part of the early days of the U.S. movement for homosexual rights, you probably didn't understand how natural these acts of cannibalism are to many groups as they crawl from the primordial soup and begin to walk proud and upright. That probably made those struggles even more emotionally difficult to survive.

The early days of the Los Angeles homosexual movement were no different. Those activists witnessed some of the most brutal battles from within, and at the same time they were facing some of our most difficult enemies from the outside. C. Todd White, in his new book Pre-Gay LA: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights ( University of Illinois, 280 pages, paper, $25, cloth $75 ) uses a finely tuned microscope to focus in depth on the early years of Los Angeles activism, well before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York, and before �gay� became the moniker of choice.

See Pre-Gay LA: Battle scars Windy City Times
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The Hard-Core in Gay & Lesbian Publishing

2009-06-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

These are exciting times for book people, gay book people included. Although the LGBT book world has seen some sad transitions in recent months, including the loss of two of our most venerable bookstores (New York City's Oscar Wilde Bookstore and A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood), we've also seen some exciting and hopeful transitions; for starters, the appointment of the smart and innovative Amy Scholder as editor-in-chief of the Feminist Press and Don Weise as the new publisher of Alyson Books.

With the Feminist Press approaching its 40th anniversary and Alyson, along with Cleis Press, celebrating 30 years in 2010, these stalwarts of gay and feminist publishing are moving forward with energy and creative vision.

Indeed, some of the best LGBT literature continues to be issued by independent publishers, some of them formally gay or feminist presses and other more general presses with a commitment to the issues. We invited Alyson's Weise, who moved to that house after five years at Carroll & Graf, to reach out to some of those presses to see what they are planning for fall. And we spared him the duty of reporting on his own efforts at Alyson and include our own talk with Weise at the end.

Johnny Temple, Akashic Books

�Akashic has always had a strong commitment to publishing works by LGBT authors. We're delighted to have released work from the likes of Nina Revoyr, T Cooper and Felicia Luna Lemus. Our current top-selling novel is Ruins by Achy Obejas; although the story, set in Cuba in the mid-1990s, doesn't offer prominent queer themes, the author has a very strong lesbian and gay readership. The novel was recently selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series.�

The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack ($15.95, July; ISBN 978-1-933354-71-2) mixes elements of humor, horror, history, haute couture... and homosexuality.

Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep ($15.95, May; ISBN 978-1-933354-81-1) is drawing rave reviews and features queer and bisexual characters in a tale set amid evolving relationships in the lives of two sisters and their mother.

Will Work for Drugs by Lydia Lunch ($15.95, July; ISBN 978-1-933354-73-6) is a new collection from the downtown New York City icon.

Brian Lam, Arsenal Pulp Press

�The books that sell best tend to be ones that most reflect the current culture�in the years since Will and Grace and Ellen put a face to the LGBT experience, there is a growing interest in books that represent all aspects of it. One of our fall 2009 titles, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, reflects on the transition from being a lesbian to a gay man. At the same time, the debate over gay marriage is reflected in our Dictionary of Homophobia in 2008, a 300-page translation from the French edited by Louis-Georges Tin, who recently spearheaded a U.N. resolution to criminalize homophobia, which has been signed by President Obama, among others.�

The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S. Bear Bergman ($18.95 paper, Oct.; ISBN 978-1-55152-264-7) Humorous, thoughtful essays on gender by the author of Butch Is a Noun.

American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860�1970 by David L. Chapman and Brett Josef Grubisic ($29.95 paper, Oct.; ISBN 978-1-55152-256-2). A full-color collection of images and essays on the muscular American male from a homoerotic perspective.

Karin Kallmaker, Bella Books

�Technology has created new challenges, not the least of which is maintaining that old, very low-tech person-to-person building of readership. We and our sister press, Spinsters Ink, are not relying exclusively on Internet marketing, waiting for the readers to come to us. We are launching an annual Y Tour to bring authors to where the untapped readers are and connect through mutual interest in local charities. Over four days, lesbian authors from both presses will be building houses with Habitat for Humanity, raising money for local charities at one of the largest party gatherings of lesbians in the United States, and taking part in a first-ever all-lesbian public library event in the Denver area. It's called the Y Tour because we're putting some 'Y' back in womYn.�

Sea Legs by KG MacGregor ($14.95 paper, Sept.; ISBN 978-1-59493-158-1). A screwball comedy ensues when Kelly agrees to help Natalie win back her ex, Didi, by pretending they are crazy about each other�only Kelly's not pretending.

The Scorpion by Gerri Hill ($14.95 paper, Dec.; ISBN 978-1-59493-162-8). Reporter Marty Edwards and Det. Kristen Bailey have to learn to trust each other, and fast, or neither may survive the sting of a murderer.

Len Barot, Bold Strokes Books

�Publishers of gay and lesbian literature find themselves in a gray zone between 'mainstream publishing' and 'niche publishing.' While it's true that we predominantly publish works that are of interest to a minority population, there is definite crossover between books written for and about the gay and lesbian (and bi/trans/queer) community/experience and the non-LGBTQ reading population. The crossover is strongest in general fiction, both lesbian and gay, and in the genre fiction categories of mystery and speculative fiction. In this time of economic recession, digital publishing has definitely offered some insulation against the decline in print sales, with a fourfold increase in e-book sales for our titles in the last year. The trends among our titles mirror the general trend in fiction sales as a whole�the largest single category of sales is genre romance followed by mystery/intrigue. We have also had an excellent response to our 'Classics Reissues'�works by luminaries such as Felice Picano, John Morgan Wilson and J.M. Redmann.�

The Reluctant Daughter by Lesl�a Newman ($16.95 paper, Sept.; ISBN 987-1-60282-118-7).

Returning Tides by Radclyffe ($16.95 paper, Nov.; ISBN 987-1-60282-123-1).

Felice Newman, Cleis Press

�Despite trends, the mission of gay/lesbian publishing doesn't change. We publish books that save lives. Last spring's The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals is the only book on the subject and hopefully it can prevent the bullying and harassment that harm transgender young people. Recently, we received an e-mail from a young bookseller in the South asking for Jon Ginoli to stop by his store on Ginoli's tour for Deflowered: My Life in the Pansy Division. The young bookseller wrote that the queer punk band kept him from killing himself in high school.

�On the business front, we are relieved to report that we are actually up 10% in the first quarter of 2009, compared to last year, due to backlist sales and newly released books outperforming projections.�

The Low Road by James Lear ($14.95 paper, Aug.; ISBN 978-1-57344-364-7) brings the author's trademark high adventure, crackling dialogue and rowdy sex to this historical romance in 18th-century Scotland.

Riddle of the Sands by Geoff Knight ($14.95 paper, Sept.; ISBN 978-1-57344-366-1). Indiana Jones meets gay erotica.

Amy Scholder, The Feminist Press

�Having worked in independent publishing for more than 20 years (as editor-in-chief at Seven Stories Press, U.S. publisher of Verso N.Y., editor of High Risk Books/Serpent's Tail, to name a few), it has been exciting to bring my particular background and expertise to the Feminist Press. We've retooled, launching a new Web site (in September 2009) to reach out to younger readers; hiring new staff to address the changing industry; acquiring over a dozen books by writers including Barbara Hammer, Laura Whitehorn, Elizabeth Streb, Karen Finley, June Jordan and others; and introducing a new series called Contemporary Classics, while actively seeking literary works by feminist writers from around the world.�

Women Who Kill by Ann Jones ($15.95 paper, Oct.; ISBN 978-1-58861-607-3) is the first in the Contemporary Classics series.

Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life by Barbara Hammer ($19.95 paper, Mar. 2010; ISBN 978-1-55861-612-7; $39.95 limited edition hardcover, ISBN 978-1-55861-614-1). �Barbara Hammer is a true cinematic pioneer.��Jenni Olson.

John Scognamiglio, Kensington

�Kensington continues to do what it does best, publishing commercial gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction. Two of its summer titles are aimed not just at gay and lesbian readers but mainstream readers as well: Rakesh Satyal's charming debut novel, Blue Boy, about a young Indian boy coming-of-age in Ohio, and Eddie Sarfaty's Mental, a collection of humorous essays very much in the tradition of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. The focus isn't on being gay.

�One genre that is growing for Kensington is the coming-of-age story, which has really evolved since Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story.�

Midnight Hunger by Todd Gregory, Chase Masters and Sean Wolfe ($15 paper, Sept.; ISBN 978-0-7582-3536-7).

Men I Might Have Known by Brad Saunders ($15 paper, Nov.; ISBN 978-0-7582-2962-5).

Laura Baumbach, MLR Press

�Just this month, the Romance Writers of America accepted a new chapter: Rainbow Romance Writers, devoted to authors who write LGBT romance. And New York publishing houses are publishing more mainstream stories with LGBT characters; one is even experimenting with a line of gay historical novels marketed to straight women. As a publisher of gay romance and fiction, I see a wider appeal growing in that audience of straight women, traditionally the largest consumer of romance novels. At the same time, in this age of expanding legalization of gay marriage and a growing realization that love and romance are for everyone, reading romance is even beginning to appeal to gay men. Acceptance of LGBT romance by mainstream readership can only nurture acceptance in other walks of everyday life.�

The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn ($TBA, June; ISBN 978-1-60820-048-1). Essays by Earl Kemp, Ian Young, Victor J. Banis, William Maltese, Michael Bronski et al. survey the period roughly between the first Kinsey Report and the first collection of Tales of the City.

The 38-Million-Dollar Smile by Richard Stevenson ($14.99, Sept.; ISBN 978-1-60820-013-9). The 10th novel in the acclaimed Donald Strachey mystery series from a three-time Lambda finalist.

Jennifer Joseph, Manic D

�Books have always been key to opening people's closed minds. The success of Thea Hillman's recent memoir, Intersex (for Lack of a Better Word), demonstrates that curiosity and compassion are stronger than ever among all readers. At a recent San Francisco book festival, a heterosexual lawyer dad stopped by, pointed to Intersex (for Lack of a Better Word), and said, 'Oh, I'm reading that now. I picked it up at Books Inc.; it's really interesting.'

�Forthcoming this summer is a debut novel, Lilac Mines, a spellbinding narrative that's part history, part mystery, very contemporary... with a dash of magical realism thrown in. In September, Manic D is releasing Lynnee Breedlove's One Freak Show. Known for his critically acclaimed bike messenger novel, Godspeed, Breedlove is hilarious�whether he's taking on transgender restroom etiquette issues, language limitations involving pronouns or the difficulties in making a cup of coffee before you've had one.�

Lilac Mines by Cheryl Klein ($15.95 paper, Aug.; ISBN 978-1-93314-931-8). Trendy hipster dyke Felix joins her stoic aunt Anna Lisa in a hardscrabble town in the Sierra foothills after being gay bashed, and explores the town's namesake mystery: the disappearance of 16-year-old Lilac Ambrose in 1899.

Lynne� Breedlove's One Freak Show by Lynn Breedlove ($14.95 paper, Sept.; ISBN 978-1-93314-932-5). A gender-bending collection of comedic thoughts and essays.

Raphael Kadushin, University of Wisconsin Press

�Those books that have attracted multiple markets are working best for us, especially now that gay authors aren't as easily ghettoized as they once were. So, for example, Lev Raphael's My Germany is building sales largely through a Jewish market and readers interested in the Holocaust and German history, as much as Raphael's existing gay audience. Michael Montlack's My Diva is getting a lot of attention from the mainstream press as well as the gay press, since the figure of the diva is such an integral part of pop culture. Alistair McCartney's End of the World, though informed by a gay sensibility, really won attention among serious readers of literary fiction more for the beauty of its prose than for its gay content. And Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls sold as well to fans of Seaton's poetry as it did to a lesbian market. But all these books also depend very much on gay readers and reviewers, and we don't want to take that core market for granted.�

Gay American Autobiography, edited by David Bergman ($29.95 paper, May; ISBN 978-0-299-23044-9). Collecting 150 years of gay life writing from Thoreau and Henry James to David Sedaris and Justin Chin.

Sugarless by James Magruder ($24.95, Oct.; ISBN 978-0-299-23380-8). A coming-of-age (and coming-out) story set in the 1970s against the backdrop of cutthroat high school forensics tournaments.

Alyson Books, Don Weise

Despite arriving as publisher of Alyson Books only last fall, Weise has put together a strong fall list. Alyson continues its titles in humor, mystery and erotica, but Weise has expanded into new categories, including lesbian and gay true crime, current affairs, more self-help/wellness and, perhaps most notably, TV/film/magazine tie-ins to the properties owned by Alyson's parent company, Regent Media, which operates the premium cable channel Here TV and owns the Advocate and Out magazine.

Says Weise, �In spite of what I sometimes hear about 'nobody reading' or gay books no longer functioning as a driving force of visibility, our lives as LGBT people can't always be reduced to a half-hour sitcom or a two-hour movie. We sometimes need an 80,000-word book to tell our stories.�

Mapping the Territory: Selected Nonfiction by Christopher Bram ($23.95, Sept.; ISBN 978-1-59350-143-3). The first book of nonfiction from an author Tony Kushner calls �one of the best novelists writing in the world today.�

Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks ($14.95 paper, Jan. 2010; ISBN 978-1-59350-154-9). The long-awaited debut novel from Boy's Don't Cry screenwriter Laurie Weeks, whose work was recently selected by Dave Eggers for Best Non-Required Reading 2008.

See The Hard-Core in Gay & Lesbian Publishing Publishers Weekly
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Gay football book wins Lambda Lit Award

2009-05-29T17:54:00.001-07:00

Congratulations to lontime Outsports friend Bill Konigsberg, who won a Lambda Literary Award last night for his book about a gay high school football player, Out of the Pocket. The award was for LGBT Children's/Young Adult. Bill's been on the forefront of gay visibility in the sports media since he came out at ESPN in a widely read column on ESPN.com. The book has been very well-received by critics and the public, so congrats to Bill for the recognition of his wonderful book!� See

Gay football book wins Lambda Lit Award

Outsports.com

RADAR Spectacle helps queer-centric writers

2009-05-28T22:44:00.001-07:00

Three things you will not encounter at the RADAR Spectacle literary event, as suggested by co-hosts Michelle Tea and Ali Liebegott:

1. A heterosexual gray-haired male from academia reading self-important observations about the weather while wearing a tweed jacket. "No tweed blazers allowed," said Liebegott, "without irony."

2. A young Bukowski wannabe tearing off his shirt whilst yelling poetry. "In fact, no one will be yelling anything," Tea added. "Unless for a good reason."

3. Poetry voice. (Enough said?)

"You're more likely to get cruised than to get bored," Tea said.

San Francisco author Tea started the nonprofit RADAR Productions nearly six years ago on the heels of her national spoken word tour, Sister Spit, to support literary events for queer-centric writers and performers whose material cut outside the mainstream. The Spectacle is a benefit for RADAR's first-ever writer's lab, where 12 recipients will write and polish their works at a retreat in Akumal, Mexico.

Think of it as an Iowa Writers' Workshop seminar with far edgier source material.

"A lot of the writers are those voices who feel marginalized," Tea said. "The kid who ran away from home or had rocks thrown at them by the other kids. They're banged up. And we try to give them a place to work, and cultivate an audience that supports them."

�See RADAR Spectacle helps queer-centric writers

Paul Burston: Gay London's Jane Austen Independent

2009-05-24T12:09:00.001-07:00

The normally ebullient Paul Burston greets me at his south London flat looking slightly irritated. He's just read a patronising piece about his new novel, The Gay Divorcee, in a gay paper snootily announcing, "He's no Alan Hollinghurst". There can be few more annoying things than being criticised for not being something you hadn't set out to be in the first place.

"I like Alan Hollinghurst's work, and Michael Arditti's, and Neil Bartlett's. But I think there should be a place for stuff that isn't literary as well!" he protests. There is, he points out, no Gay Men's Press any more, no publishing house dedicated to gay books, which makes it difficult for gay writers to be published and heard. He even set up his own literary salon, Polari, to promote gay writing, because, after publishing four non-fiction books and a couple of well-received novels, he had never been invited to a mainstream literary festival.

"There is this perception, which I hope is incorrect, that the average reader doesn't want to read about contemporary gay life. To me, that's surreal, when you think how popular Queer As Folk was. And yet gay stories by and large just don't get published, or if they do, they tend to be the more literary ones. I think if something is literary, that gives it an alibi for existing. Or if it's safely historical. So if it's lesbians in Victorian England, it's okay. I'm not knocking [Sarah Waters]!" he says quickly, "but one of the reasons why authors who write literary or historical fiction which happens to be gay get more attention is because their work is less threatening to the reader."

Burston's four novels, in contrast, have been up-to-the-minute, unashamedly commercial and absolutely in-yer-face. Two of the central characters in The Gay Divorcee, Carl and Martin, are "as close as two gay men could be without a tube of KY between them". The characters do drugs, blog, bitch, drink to excess and sleep around. It's like chick lit, but for gay men (and the women who love them). Er... dick lit?

"Fag lit," laughs Burston. "Everyone just assumes that because I'm gay, all my favourite writers are gay, and they're not at all. One of my proper favourite writers by far � I literally wait for each book � is Marian Keyes. I adore her books. 'Chick lit' is a label used by snooty literary types as if something's rubbish, and her books are way above that. They have all the qualities of literature, they're just written in an accessible way. Her books are as much of an influence on me as anything gay."

�See

Paul Burston: Gay London's Jane Austen

Independent

Books of The Times An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford

2009-05-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

There�s a nice, small moment in Reynolds Price�s new memoir, �Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back,� in which he describes a meal he shared in 1957 with the English writers Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly and the American academic Lionel Trilling. Mr. Price was at Oxford University at the time, studying on a Rhodes Scholarship.
It was an awkward evening. Mr. Trilling �gave off a soberly academic whiff of disapproval of these laughing English writers,� Mr. Price writes. Mr. Spender and Mr. Connolly, for their part, were amused that Mr. Trilling had �written an entire humorless book about E. M. Forster� without perceiving an elemental fact: Forster was gay.
American readers can be forgiven if, as Mr. Trilling did with Forster, they have not noticed that Reynolds Price himself is � to borrow James McGreevey�s phrase � a gay American. Over the course of his long career and across his jumbo-size output (38 books of fiction, poetry, plays, essays and other nonfiction), Mr. Price has deployed gay characters only sparingly.
He is far better known for being a native of North Carolina, where much of his fiction is set, and for his probing interest in religious faith. Mr. Price hasn�t exactly hidden the fact that he is gay; he is simply a private person who hasn�t tattooed this information, in curly script, on one of his biceps.
Mr. Price�s reluctance to write about gay life makes �Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back,� feel like a boisterous coming-out party. The book details six years in Mr. Price�s life, 1955-61, when he was in his early 20s, and it is, for sure, about many things beyond his sexuality � namely his years at Oxford and his beginnings as a writer. But the book seems most alive when it details what it was like to be young and gay and on the prowl � Mr. Price at one point describes himself as �a sexual wolverine� � in the buttoned-down 1950s. See Books of The Times An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford
New York Times

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Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality in New Book

2009-05-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

Archbishop Weakland�s autobiography, �A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop� (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), covers his hardscrabble youth in Pennsylvania, his election as the worldwide leader of the Benedictine Order and his appointment by Pope Paul VI to the archbishop�s seat in Milwaukee, where he served for 25 years.

�He was one of the most gifted leaders in the post-Vatican II church in America,� said the Rev. Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest and associate editor of America, a Catholic magazine, �and certainly beloved by the left, and sadly that gave his critics more ammunition.�

In an interview at the Archbishop Weakland Center, which houses the archdiocesan cathedral offices in downtown Milwaukee, Archbishop Weakland said the church opened itself to change in the 1960s and �70s after the Second Vatican Council but became increasingly centralized and doctrinally rigid under Pope John Paul II.

Archbishop Weakland was among those who publicly questioned the need for a male-only celibate priesthood. He also led American bishops in a two-year process of writing a pastoral letter on economic justice, holding hearings on the subject across the country.

A later effort by the American bishops to issue a pastoral letter on women was quashed by the Vatican, he said, because the Vatican did not want to give the national bishops conferences the authority to issue sweeping teaching documents.

The archbishop said it was partly because of his strained relations with Pope John Paul II that he did not tell Vatican officials in 1997 when he was threatened with a lawsuit by Paul J. Marcoux, the man with whom he had a relationship nearly 20 years before and who had appeared on �Good Morning America.�

Mr. Marcoux said then that he had been deprived of income from marketing a project he called �Christodrama� because of Archbishop Weakland�s interference. Archbishop Weakland said he probably should have gone to Rome and explained that he had had a relationship with Mr. Marcoux, that he had ended it by writing an emotional letter that Mr. Marcoux still had and that the archbishop�s lawyers regarded Mr. Marcoux�s threats as blackmail.

But, the archbishop said, a highly placed friend in Rome advised him that church officials preferred that such things be hushed up, which is �the Roman way.� See Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality New York Times gay books lesbian books gay men

'Likewise,' A Wry Comic About Growing Up Gay

2009-05-04T19:04:00.000-07:00

Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag

By Ariel Schrag
Paperback, 400 pages
Touchtone
List Price: $16

If phoniness is still the plague of adolescence, Ariel Schrag's obsession with truth-telling would make Holden Caulfield proud.

In Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag, her four-part series of autobiographical graphic novels, the 29-year-old cartoonist moves year-by-year through her life as a gay teen in 1990s California, tackling puberty, friendship and coming out along the way.

Schrag is something of a prodigy; she won a book contract at age 17 and turned out the first two books of the series � Awkward and Definition � while still a student. The third book, Potential, was nominated for an Eisner Award and is in development as a feature film directed by Rose Troche of The L Word.

Now, Likewise, the series' long-awaited final chapter, follows Schrag's literary doppelganger, Ariel, through her turbulent senior year in high school � during which she endures her parents' divorce, an excruciating college application process and a torturous unrequited love affair with a willowy straight girl named Sally.

'Likewise,' A Wry Comic About Growing Up Gay

NPR -

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Exquisite prose, exceptional dialogue mark Vestal McIntyre's debut novel

2009-05-02T21:35:00.000-07:00

Vestal McIntyre's debut novel on small-town life has been reviewed by Tavo Amado:

" The coming of age/coming out story has long been a staple of gay literature, but in his gripping first novel, Vestal McIntyre gives it a fresh, multi-dimensional perspective by recreating a small town in 1987 peopled with memorable characters, all of whom ring true. IN Lake Overturn: A Novel (Harper, $24), McIntyre confronts homosexuality, class distinctions, racial/ethnic prejudice, religious values, challenges faced by single mothers, death, and erotic desires. Although he avoids Peyton Place cliches and sensationalism, he never sacrifices narrative drive. ...

With exquisite prose, exceptional dialogue, and a superbly controlled gift for creating a sense of place, McIntyre brilliantly moves among his characters, their dilemmas, hopes, fears, transgressions, and the consequences of their actions. He recreates the stifling provincialism of Eula, a town dominated by Anglo Mormons and Christian Evangelicals, who confront a growing Latino population of Catholics. Because he doesn't condescend to them, McIntyre also shows the kindness many of these unsophisticated people are capable of, despite their prejudices and intolerance. No one is one-dimensional." MORE

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LGBT Book, Film & Video Blog

Lesbian and gay erotica in new Swing anthology out today in print

A teen book burns at the stake

A teen book burns at the stake

'Playing for My Life�

A TERRIBLE SPLENDOR

A Terrible Splendor: Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played

LARRY KRAMER: Review: Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform

THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE

THE GREEKS AND GREEK LOVE

Christian group sues to burn gay teen novel

"Double Bound" Wins Double Book Awards for Gay/Lesbian Fiction

Christian group sues for right to burn gay teen novel

Harold Norse dies at 92; Beat poet was a literary beacon in the gay community

Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

by Tim Pfaff

Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

by Tim Pfaff

Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

by Tim Pfaff

The Library Don't Have a Closet: 19 Graphic Novels for Gay & Lesbian Pride Month

Pre-Gay LA: Battle scars Windy City Times

The Hard-Core in Gay & Lesbian Publishing

Gay football book wins Lambda Lit Award

Gay football book wins Lambda Lit Award

RADAR Spectacle helps queer-centric writers

Paul Burston: Gay London's Jane Austen Independent

Books of The Times An American Writer, Coming of Age in Oxford

Ex-Archbishop Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality in New Book

'Likewise,' A Wry Comic About Growing Up Gay

By Ariel SchragPaperback, 400 pagesTouchtoneList Price: $16

'Likewise,' A Wry Comic About Growing Up Gay

Exquisite prose, exceptional dialogue mark Vestal McIntyre's debut novel

By Ariel Schrag
Paperback, 400 pages
Touchtone
List Price: $16