QueerType

The buzz: Christine Baranski, George Grizzard, Stan Phillips, and Jackie Hoffman will headline Paul Rudnick’s new play, Regrets Only, premiering October at New York City Center. Charles Busch will host the New York Innovative Theatre Awards on September 18, honoring achievement in off-off-Broadway theater. Arch Brown has launched the Thorny Theater, a new LGBT theater located in Palm Springs, CA. Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, currently producing the movie version of Hairspray, are planning a revival of Peter Pan for ABC TV in late 2007. Gay author and actor Stephen Frey will reveal his struggle with depression and suicide contemplation in a new BBC documentary later this year, The Secret Life of A Manic Depressive. China has banned South Korea’s immensely popular movie, King and the Clown, because of its subtle gay themes. The government of Turkey recently shut down the gay magazine Kaos GL citing "general morality" after the magazine included an article entitled "Visuality of Sexuality, Sexuality of Visuality: Pornography" in their latest issue. Grove/Atlantic will publish Charles Kaiser’s The Cost of Courage: A Family Divided by the French Resistance, which follows the true story of a family on an unpredictable journey through Nazi-occupied Paris, four German concentration camps, and the labyrinth of their emotions after World War II. In bookstores soon: Christopher Bram’s new novel, Exiles in America, Stephen Beachy’s novellas, Some Phantom/No Time Flat, Jeff Mann’s collection of erotica, A History of Barbed Wire, Anthony Bidulka’s new mystery Tapas on the Ramblas, Richard Grayson’s Highly Irregular Stories, and Toby Johnson’s novel, Two Spirits, A Story of Life with the Navajo. Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse in Atlanta was the target of several anti-gay protests during June and July. Customers and activists rallied behind the bookstore and staged counter-protests. Haworth Press, the popular publisher of gay books and journals, was unexpectedly closed for a week in July 2006 due to the flooding that affected the mid-Atlantic area. Located in Binghamton, NY, the press has an account of the flood on its Web site.

Kudos: Ivey Banks, the nom-de-plume of Dora McAlpin-Zeeks, a mother in Odenton, Maryland, won The Next Big Writer, the online novel-writing contest, for her gay-themed novel Out of the Dark, in which teenager Thorn MacDonnell struggles with his sexuality and the fact that he has been diagnosed with HIV and leukemia. The winning prize carries a $5000 award. Lesley C. Weston, head of costume design for The New York City Opera, was runner-up for the novel, Nancy Boy. Q. Allen Brocka and Phillip Pierce took the outstanding screenwriting prize at L.A. Outfest for their screenplay adaptation of Matthew Rettendmund’s novel Boy Culture. Gay friendly Kathy Griffin was nominated for an Emmy for My Life on the D-List. Also garnering an Emmy nod was South Park’s Tom Cruise-centered episode “Trapped in the Closet” for Outstanding Animated Program.

Open calls: Robert Paul Cesaretti is accepting fiction and poetry for the next issue of his literary journal, ginosko, distributed throughout the San Francisco Bay area. Submissions can be mailed to PO Box 246, Fairfax CA 94978. Kevin Bentley and Green Candy Press are looking for essays for Sex by the Book: Tales of Lit and Lust. Deadline is October 30, 2006 and submissions should be sent to Green Candy Press, 601 Van Ness Avenue, E-918, San Francisco, CA 94102. Jolie du Pre is looking for submissions for Iridescence: Lovely Shades of Lesbian Erotica forthcoming from Alyson. Deadline is August 31, 2006 and should be sent to womenofcolor@ameritech.net. Gayfest NYC producers Bruce Robert Harris and Jack W. Batman are now accepting submissions for the Festival of New Plays and Musicals to be presented in New York City, May 9-June 2, 2007. The Festival will feature three Main Stage productions, a Studio reading series of new works, guest speakers, talk-backs and other events. Two plays and one musical will be selected for fully-produced Main Stage productions with Actors’ Equity Association casts and professional directors and staff personnel. Work should deal with LGBT characters or issues in some literal or metaphorical way. Deadline is September 30, 2006. Mail two copies of script and one copy of score (on CD only) to: GAYFEST NYC, c/o Bruce Robert Harris, One River Place, Suite 917, New York, NY 10036. To commemorate this year's World AIDS Day observance on December 1 at the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco, the memorial's board of directors is asking the public for personal testimonies, remembrances, and reflections on the effects of the AIDS pandemic. In keeping with the event’s theme, “AIDS at 25,” the memorial is asking people to identify a single year since 1981 and explain how the pandemic affected them during that year. "This could be a recollection of your own or a loved one's experiences in dealing with AIDS, or remembering the wide swath the disease made in those early years when there were no medications," said Jack Porter, co-chairman of the World AIDS Day observance, in a press statement. "Or it could be related to learning of your own diagnosis or that of a loved one in the last couple years; a visit to an AIDS-stricken African village; or a poignant moment in your work with a client of an AIDS service agency." Submissions should be submitted by September 15 via e-mail to mystory@aidsmemorial.org or by standard mail to the National AIDS Memorial, 856 Stanyan St., San Francisco, CA, 94117. The remembrance service will be held December 1 at the memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

The buzz: Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel (current untitled), an elegiac multigenerational family saga about an affluent English family, will be published by Bloomsbury in August 2008. Crown will publish Brett Berk’s The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. Pulitzer prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex) has assembled an anthology of Greatest Love Stories of All Time, which will be published by Harper. The late sci-fi author Octavia Butler was honored with a tribute at the New York Public Library on June 5. Her mentor, author Samuel R. Delaney, was among the guests offering reminisces. Toni Amato has started a new LJ community, called whwn, as the first Write Here Write Now online writer's workshop. http://community.livejournal.com/whwn/. David Hockney’s 1966 painting, “The Splash,” sold for £2.6 million. Books Inc. will take over the space of the former A Clean Well-Lighted Space in San Francisco. The Peppertree Bookstore in Palm Springs is opening a second store in La Quinta. O, Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, scoured a coup by publishing a letter from the reclusive Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town. The world premier of Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, a biopic about writer Truman Capote, will open the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in August. Johnny Depp is being considered for the title role of Tim Burton’s film adaptation of the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd. The New York Post reported that Brendan Fraser has been cast as legendary gay designer Halston in an upcoming biopic. Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard are in negotiations to star in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 1988 gay-themed novel. Bryan Singer, the openly gay director of Superman Returns, will direct the upcoming Harvey Milk biopic, The Mayor of Castro Street, based on Randy Shilts’ award-winning book. Here television is developing a new film with a screenplay by Chastity Bono and Garth Belcon titled In the Name of Love, about a lesbian troubled by heterosexual dreams. The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society announced the launch of its own YouTube channel in June. The channel will build a growing archive of historical GLBT video clips that will be accessible to the public. ThinkFilm will distribute John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, which recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In June the Logo network acquired three popular gay and lesbian news-entertainment sites as part of its continuing efforts to target online queer audiences. AfterEllen.com, AfterElton.com, and 365gay.com have joined the Web portfolio of the MTV-owned gay cable channel. Logo has also put into development a series based on Del Shores popular play and cult movie, Sordid Lives.

Kudos: Colm Toibin was named the recipient of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest literary prize, for his novel The Master. The Queer Foundation 2006 Queer Scholars are: Jason Brown of San Francisco State University, Julianne Maynus of Rhode Island College, and Scarlett Sieber of Fordham University. Educators are encouraged to download the essays from http://home.comcast.net/~threepennynovel/qfessays2006/ for use in the classroom.

Open calls: Richard Labonté is looking for stories for a new anthology for Cleis Press: Country Boys: Dirty Gay Erotica. Stories should have a physically rural setting and/or an emotionally rural mindset. Deadline is September 1, 2006. Original stories preferred but reprints will be considered. Maximum length 7,000 words. E-mail submissions and queries to tattyhill@gmail.com.

Not a Queer Issue: Gay leaders thought an arsonist was making a political statement by setting a fire in Chicago that destroyed nearly 80 books in the Merlo Branch library’s gay and lesbian collection on June 13. According to the local police, it appears they guessed the wrong cause. The police said Erica Graham, 21, who is homeless, was protesting the library's treatment of homeless people when she started the fire. That the books burned were mainly about gays and lesbians turned out to be a coincidence, police said. Seventy-seven books from the gay and lesbian collection and 23 books from the African-American collection were destroyed. "We're happy they found the person who did it, and we're happy it doesn't appear to be a hate crime," Rick Garcia, a head of the gay rights group Equality Illinois told a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. "The gay community has made great gains in the last 20 years. But you don't have to scratch too far below the surface to find anti-gay sentiment."

This Guy’s Just Interested in the Illustrations: Randy Jackson, an Idaho man checked out The Joy of Gay Sex from his local library in Nampa to protest a recent library board decision to keep the book on the shelf. Several news articles reported that he has no intention of returning the book to the library. In June the library board voted 3–1 to keep the books in circulation but place them on higher shelves and routinely sweep the library to make sure they are not lying around. There has been no word on whether the library plans to fine Jackson for the overdue book or whether it will buy a replacement copy.

Three Discoveries: During the spring, works by three writers came to my attention that I can highly recommend, one is Richard Grayson’s surreal and thought-provoking short story, “With Hitler in New York,” which was also the title of a collection of his short stories that were published in the late 1970s and which has been recently reissued. In the story, “Hitler” becomes a stand-in for the alienation and discrimination many Germans felt in the decades after the war. The story is readable on-line via a link on Grayson's Web Site. (http://www.richardgrayson.com/) Grayson also has an impressive political background (in the 1980s he was a Presidential candidate), but it is his short fiction that intrigues me most. His other collections worth exploring are Let Slip the Dogs of War, Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog and Other Stories, and his most recent collection, And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street. Another re-isssued work came my way recently, Toby Johnson’s superb gay-themed science fiction novel, Secret Matter. Johnson, a former Catholic monk and San Francisco hippie who became a noted religion scholar and editor of the White Crane Journal, is also the author of two superb non-fiction books, Gay Spirituality and Gay Perspective, but it is Johnson’s utopian and romantic vision that makes Secret Matter such a compelling read. The novel is set in San Francisco in the immediate future, just after a destructive earthquake, when a race of alien Visitors arrive. Secret Matter was the winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men’s Science Fiction and has been nominated for the Gaylaxicon Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame. More on the novel and the author can be found at Johnson’s Web site, http://www.tobyjohnson.com/. I was a fan of Wayne Hoffman’s long before he recently published his first novel; in the late 1990s we worked together at The New York Blade News. I was always impressed by Wayne’s sharp observations of popular culture (at the time, he was the Arts Editor), but it was also obvious to me that he had a clear and passionate interest in the field of sexual politics (he was also one of the co-editors of the anthology Policing Public Sex). Hoffman has set his extraordinary first novel, Hard, in New York City in the mid-1990s, at a time when the city government was cracking down on public sex venues. While the novel is a complex weave of situations and scenes, the primary conflict is between two gay journalists: one, an AIDS widower who wants to see all the sex clubs and adult theaters shut down, and the other, a young and sex-positive activist who wants to keep them open. Hoffman’s details of the city and the gay community of this era are superb (and he does present a “community” – from buff-bod hustlers to hunky bears to HIV-positive ex-lovers). While the political construct is what makes this novel so unique in gay fiction, it is Hoffman’s dead-on descriptions (witty and wise) of his characters’ sexual psyche that make it soar. (One character, in fact, runs a delightful cost-analysis on how much his search for sex costs him.) But I am also happy to report, that while Hard is political, sexy, comic, and full of social-consciousness, it is also encased in a surprising romantic yearning. More on Wayne and his book can be found at http://www.hardthenovel.com/.

Passages: Eric Rofes, an educator, author and gay rights activist, died June 26, 2006 in Provincetown, Mass. He was 51. A Boston native who currently lived in San Francisco, Rofes had been working on a book when he was discovered dead. Rofes wrote or edited 12 books, some of which provoked controversy, among them Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic (1995), Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (1998), and most recently, A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling : Status Quo or Status Queer? (Curriculum, Cultures, and (Homo)Sexualities) (2005). Rofes was born on Aug. 31, 1954, in Brooklyn. He grew up in Commack on Long Island and graduated from Harvard in 1976. In the 1970's, he was one of the so-called “Boston Mafia” who founded the Gay Community News and the Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. In 1985, he was hired as executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. After moving to San Francisco in 1989, he headed the Shanti Project, an AIDS service group. Rofes received his master's from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995 and his doctorate in 1998. He had taught at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., since 1999. Surviving are his partner of 16 years, Crispin Hollings of San Francisco; a brother, Peter, of Milwaukee; and a sister, Paula Casey-Rofes.

Ralph Paul Gernhardt, a pioneering publisher who cofounded Gay Chicago magazine three decades ago, died in June 4, 2006, of lung cancer. He was 72. Gernhardt started a telephone hotline offering a recorded message about gay-friendly parties and clubs in 1972. The line's popularity convinced him that he had found a niche that was being underserved, so he cofounded Gay Chicago in 1976. He is survived by his son, Craig—who now publishes Gay Chicago—a daughter, two sisters, and three grandchildren.

The buzz: The twenty-six year old North Carolina gay newspaper The Front Page has been bought by the Charlotte based Q Notes. Former editor and publisher Jim Baxter will continue to work out of the back office of the White Rabbit bookstore in Raleigh and write for the expanded Q Notes. One of San Francisco’s best bookstores, Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, is looking for a buyer. Creative Visions, the former Greenwich Village bookstore, is now open in cyberspace at http://www.gaypleasures.com/. Everybody Reads, a new bookstore in Lansing, Michigan, that opened in May, carries general books, but owner Scott Harris focuses on "what he calls underserved groups, such as single parents, minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and children," the Lansing State Journal reported. The store offers a free meeting space and a book exchange. A grand opening is scheduled for Saturday, June 17. Everybody Reads is located at 2019 E. Michigan Ave., Lansing, Mich. 48912; 517-346-9900. The Minnesota-based Graywolf Press, which has published many distinguished queer writers and books, is opening a Manhattan office. Here! Networks bought H.I.M. (Hyperion Interactive Media) which runs a collection of more than 20 portals and Web sites, including LesbiaNation.com and GayWired.com. The gay cable channel Q Television has gone dark. Queen Latifah has signed to play an AIDS Activist in the upcoming movie Life Support, which focuses on the impact of HIV in the African American community. Author Keith Boykin is now a host of the BET television show My Two Cents. Simon and Schuster will publish Bil Wright’s new young adult title, When the Black Girl Sings. An author’s note now appears in the paperback edition of My Friend Leonard, James Frey’s gay friendly sequel to A Million Little Pieces. (“To call this book pure nonfiction would be inaccurate," the author writes. "It is a combination of fact and fiction, real and imagined events.") DC Comics is resurrecting Batwoman as a lesbian. The Color Purple: A Memory Book, an illustrated companion to the Broadway musical, with a foreward by Oprah Winfrey, will be published by Carroll & Graf this fall. The opera version of Angels in America will make its American debut in June in Boston. Terence McNally, who has the gay-themed play Some Men on the Manhattan horizon, is also writing the book for a musical version of the film Catch Me If You Can. The Broadway Lestat is dust, but Elton John is adapting Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as a musical. And Andrew Davies has adapted Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty for BBC TV.

Pink Ink: The Publishing Triangle’s Pink Ink gets underway in Manhattan on June 10th and 11th. For a full listing of workshops, panel discussions, readings, and book fairs, visit the Triangle’s Web site at http://www.publishingtriangle.org/.

Kudos: Lee Lynch, Steven Saylor, J.M. Redmann, and the Harrington Park Press were inaugurated into the annual Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame during the literary festival in May in New Orleans. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City was the winner of Britain’s Big Gay Read. The winners of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants in playwriting are: First Prize ($1,000): David Alan Moore of Chicago IL for In Times of War and David Brendan Hopes of Asheville, NC for St. Patrick’s Well and Anna Livia: Lucky in her Bridges; Second Prize ($500): Jordan Harrison of Bainbridge Island, WA for Act a Lady. Third Prize ($250): Anton Dudley of Brooklyn, NY for The Lake’s End, Brian Quirk of New York, NY for Mapplethorpe: The Opening, James Still of Venice, CA for Iron Kisses, and Brian Sloan of New York, NY for WTC View. Richard McCann’s novel, Mother of Sorrows, was the winner of Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Among the nominees for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play was Lisa Kron for Well. And in May the Obies presented playwright Eric Bentley with a Lifetime Achievement award.

Publishing Triangle Awards: The 18th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2005, were presented May 11th at the Tishman Auditorium of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Historian Karla Jay received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the longtime independent bookstore in Greenwich Village, received a special Leadership Award. The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction went to Tania Katan for My One-Night Stand with Cancer (Alyson Books). The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction went to Martin Moran for The Tricky Part (Beacon Press). The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry went to Richard Siken for Crush (Yale University Press). The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry went to Jane Miller for A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon). The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Gay Men’s Fiction went to Barry McCrea for The First Verse (Carroll & Graf). The Lesbian Fiction Award went to Patricia Grossman for Brian in Three Seasons (Permanent Press). This year the Publishing Triangle inaugurated a new literary award, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Mack Friedman was the winner for Setting the Lawn on Fire (University of Wisconsin Press). And the Robert Chesley Foundation presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to Megan Terry and an Emerging Artist award to Kathleen Warnock.

Lambda Literary Awards: The 18th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were presented May 18th in Washington, D.C. The winners were: Anthology: Freedom in the Village: 25 Years of Black, Gay Men's Writing, ed. E. Lynn Harris (Carroll & Graf). Belles Lettres: The Tricky Part by Martin Moran (Beacon Press) . Biography: February House by Sherrill Tippins (Houghton Mifflin). Children's/Young Adult: Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai (Tundra Books). Erotica: Stolen Moments: Erotic Interludes 2, edited by Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Gay Men's Debut Fiction: You Are Not the One by Vestal McIntyre (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Fiction: The Sluts by Dennis Cooper (Carroll & Graf). Gay Men's Mystery: One of These Things is Not Like the Others by D. Travers Scott (Suspect Thoughts). Gay Men's Poetry: Crush by Richard Siken (Yale). Humor: Don't Get too Comfortable by David Rakoff (Doubleday). Lesbian Debut Fiction: The Beautifully Worthless by Ali Leibegott (Suspect Thoughts). Lesbian Fiction: Babyji by Abha Dawesar (Anchor Books) and Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys (W. W. Norton). Lesbian Mystery: Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders by Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Arte Publico). Lesbian Poetry: Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon). LGBT Studies: When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David by Susan Ackerman. Nonfiction: Words to Our Now by Thomas Glave (Minnesota). Romance: Silent Thunder by Radclyffe (Bold Strokes). Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror: Daughters of an Emerald Dusk by Katherine Forrest (Alyson Books). Spirituality: Qu(e)erying Evangelism by Cheri DiNovo (The Pilgrim Press). Transgender/GenderQueer: Choir Boy by Charlie Anders (Soft Skull Press). Congressman Barney Frank received the Bridge Builder Award, but because of voting during the last session of Congress, he was unable to attend. His legislative aide, Joseph Racalto, accepted on his behalf.

Open calls: Chroma, the queer British literary journal, is sponsoring an International Short Story and Poetry Competition. Deadline is September 10, 2006. For more details visit the Web site chromajournal.co.uk. RedBone Press seeks well-written personal stories by black lesbians on the subject of coming out while married to a man. Deadline is November 3, 2006. E-mail redbonepress@yahoo.com for more details. Amie M. Evans and Trebor Healey are editing an anthology on being Queer and Catholic for Haworth Press scheduled for mid-2007. Deadline for submissions is November 1, 2006 and should be sent to Amie M. Evans/Trebor Healey, 33 Campbell Street, Woburn, Ma 01801. Lorie Selke is looking for stories for Tough Girls: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica Volume 2. Deadline is October 1, 2006. E-mail selk@io.com for more details. Lynn Jamneck of New Zealand is looking for stories for her anthology of lesbian sleuths and the supernatural. Submission period is through November 2006. Query superantho@gmail for more details. JoSelle Vanderhooft is looking for stories for Tiresias Revisited: Magical Tales for Transfolk. Deadline is October 1, 2006. Mail stories to: Tiresias Revisited, c/o JoSelle Vanderhooft, PO Box 1921, Sandy, Utah 84091-1921. Yaoi Press is currently looking for comic book scripts for their adults only Hentai series. For more details visit http://www.yaoipress.com/.

Passages: Jay Presson Allen, who wrote the screen adaptation of Cabaret as well as the play Tru, the one-man show about Truman Capote, died May 1, 2006, of a stroke, at her home in New York City. She was 84. Her other screenplays include Deathtrap, Marnie, Travels with My Aunt, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Forty Carats, and Funny Lady. She was married to producer Lewis Allen from 1955 to 2003.

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 http://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, http://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 http://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.

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: http://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, contact Rinah Hamburger at NormRinah@comcast.net.

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.

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

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.

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, http://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.

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.”

The buzz: David Rosen, the guiding force behind the successful gay and lesbian Insightout Book Club (and other community book clubs), has left parent company Bookspan to become an editorial director at a soon-to-be-launched Abrams Image imprint. John Scognamiglio, who has edited Kensington’s popular gay and lesbian books, has been promoted to the company’s Editor-in-Chief. Carol Seajay of Books to Watch Out For (which publishes a monthly Lesbian Edition and a Gay Men’s Edition) has launched a new edition: More Books for Women. The core reviews in the publication are written by the staff at Chicago’s Women & Children First bookstore. Dean Parisot will direct The Bill From My Father, a comedy adapted on an upcoming memoir by Bernard Cooper. Del Shores is developing a feature adaptation of his play Southern Baptist Sissies, one of several projects in the works at his production company. Shores made his film directorial debut with the cult smash comedy Sordid Lives, based on another of his plays. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Best Male Lead) and Capote (Best Feature) have been nominated for Independent Spirit Awards. Also in contention are Brokeback Mountain (Best Feature), Heath Ledger (Best Male Lead), and Ang Lee (Best Director). Gregg Araki was also nominated as Best Director for the film adaptation of Mysterious Skin. The fall issue of the Harvard Review contained a short story by Gore Vidal titled “Clouds and Eclipses.” The story, about a clergyman accused of sexual misconduct with a minor, was based on Vidal’s friend Tennessee Williams’ account of an incident in his grandfather’s past. The story was recently discovered among Vidal’s papers at a Harvard library. The story had been withheld from Vidal’s 1956 short story collection, A Thirsty Evil, because of an agreement with Williams, who though the story might embarrass his family.

A wider orbit: PlanetOut Inc. has acquired LPI Media Inc., the Los Angeles-based publisher of the Advocate, Out, Out Traveler, and HIV Plus magazines, for $24 million in cash. The acquisition creates the world’s largest media company serving gay men and lesbians. Privately held LPI, which also publishes books under the Alyson imprint, has 123 employees and about $30 million in annual sales. PlanetOut, with 152 employees, operates the Web sites PlanetOut.com, Gay.com, and Kleptomaniac.com. PlanetOut went public last year and reported third-quarter earnings of $841,000, or 5 cents a share, contrasted with a loss of $29,000, or 25 cents, for the same quarter in 2004. Revenue was $7.6 million, up 20% from $6.3 million. With the acquisition, PlanetOut hopes to double its revenue, which was $25 million last year. Bob Cohen has been named as the interim president of LPI Media.

Kudos: Adrienne Rich won the 74th annual Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California for her collection The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004. Andrew Sean Greer of San Francisco won the Gold Medal for Fiction for his novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Winners each received $2,000. Alexis DeVeaux’s biography of poet Audre Lord, Warrior Poet, won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Nonfiction given annually to outstanding books by writers of African descent. Winners receive $10,000. Among the gay titles and GLBT authors on the prestigious International Impac Dublin literary award “longlist” are The Line of Beauty by Allan Hollinghurst, The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, The Master by Colm Tóibin, Now is the Time to Open Your Heart by Alice Walker, and Lighthousekeeping by Jeannette Winterson. The winning author receives Є100,000.

Open calls: Alyson is putting together two new anthologies of “travelrotica” — one geared for gay men, the other towards lesbians. Deadline is January 15, 2006. E-mail erotica@alyson.com for more details. Alyson is also assembling an anthology of queer fetish erotica for both men and women. Deadline is also January 15, 2006. E-mail erotica@alyson.com for more details. Eric Summers is editing an erotica anthology for Starbooks Press titled Men Who Like the Feel of a Real Man. Deadline is February 1, 2006. E-mail eric@starbookspress.com for more details. Shane Allison is editing an anthology for Cleis titled Hot Cops: Gay Erotic Tales. Deadline is March 1, 2006. E-mail hotcopsubmissions@hotmail.com for more details.

Courting Customs: Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, a Vancouver gay bookstore, has been given the go-ahead to argue in front of the Supreme Court of Canada that the government should fund its legal dispute with Canada Customs. Jim Deva, a co-owner of the bookstore, said fighting Canada Customs in court could cost the store $500,000 to $1 million, which he characterized as an impossibly high figure for a bookstore (or almost anyone else) to come up with. The bookstore has been fighting Canada Customs because the federal agency blocked the importation of several books and magazines at the U.S. border, claiming they were obscene. The seized material included two series of Meatmen comic books and two books that depicted bondage and sadomasochism. In July, 2004, a British Columbia judge ordered the federal government to pay the bookstore’s court costs, because it was an important constitutional case that touched the interests of all book importers, big and small. In February 2005, the B.C. Court of Appeal reversed the lower-court ruling and killed the funding, saying that Little Sisters had assumed the role of “watchdog” over Canada Customs, but that the public had not appointed the bookstore to this role. Now, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of that ruling, and will likely provide some guidance on what kind of cases are important enough to get “advance funding,” when the litigants can’t afford to carry the costs. Joseph Arvay, a lawyer for Little Sisters, said that if the bookstore had not been granted the chance to take its case to the top court, it would have had to give up the fight. The decision creates a rematch for Little Sisters and Canada Customs at the top court. In 2000, the court criticized the agency for using arbitrary and inconsistent policies when seizing material the store was trying to import. The court did not strike down Canada Customs’ powers to censor material, but said it needed to fix its procedures. But changes implemented by the agency were done without consulting anyone in the book business or people with expertise in gay and lesbian sexuality, worsening the situation, Mr. Deva told The Globe and Mail. The agency adopted specific rules about what was not allowed into Canada, he said, but he questioned the logic behind the guidelines. “Suddenly, out of the blue, the licking of boots was not acceptable,” Devay told a reporter, as an example. “If they had known more about that fantasy, and about that sexual act perhaps they wouldn’t have thought of it as dehumanizing and degrading.”

License to Chat Revoked: University Place (Wash.) school officials have banned Geography Club, a novel about gay teens by Brent Hartinger of Tacoma, from the district’s library shelves following parents’ complaints. In an Associated Press article Superintendent Patti Banks said she was alarmed by the “romanticized” portrayal of a teen meeting a stranger at night in a park after meeting the person — revealed to be a gay classmate — in an Internet chatroom. Banks had the book withdrawn from Curtis Junior High and Curtis Senior High school libraries after a University Place couple with children in both schools filed a written complaint dated Oct. 21, 2005 asking the district to remove the book. They wrote that reading the book could result in a “casual and loose approach to sex,” encourage use of Internet porn, and the physical meeting of people through chatrooms. Banks said her decision to remove the book was not due to the homosexual theme of the novel. “We want to send a strong consistent message to all our students that meeting individuals via the Internet is extremely high-risk behavior,” Banks wrote in a letter dated Nov. 2, 2005 to the parents. “To the extent that this book might contradict that message, I have determined it should not be in our libraries, in spite of other positive aspects (e.g., a strong anti-harassment theme).” Parent Connie Claussen disagreed with Banks’ decision and said she plans to appeal to the district school board. “It is about gay students. However, the most important part of the book is that it’s about bullying, outcasts, about tolerance,” she said. “This is a really good book for any student to read.” Geography Club is one of 10 nominees for the Evergreen Young Adult Book Award 2006. “The reason gay teens are drawn to the Internet is that’s a safe place to explore their identity without being harassed or bullied,” Hartinger said in the AP article. “It’s ironic my book would be pulled for this reason, contributing to this atmosphere of silence and gay intolerance.”

License to Advertise Revoked: When lesbian couple Robin Beck and Patty Henges, co-owners of the year-old Another Book Store in Mishawaka, Ind., decided to start a queer youth support group, they also decided to advertise their bookstore in the local Mishawaka High School student newspaper Alltold. They gave a copy of their business card and a $25 check to a store regular who is on the high school newspaper staff. But Henges received a call from newspaper advisor Jeff Halicki telling her the ad wouldn’t appear in the publication and that officials at school had responded that they did not want to “expose our teens to your type of establishment,” according to the South Bend Tribune. The school’s action could be a violation of the First Amendment, said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va. “They have to present some legal justification,” Goodman told the Tribune. “If the student [or advertiser] could show that this was in fact an attempt to silence this viewpoint, then that may very well be impermissible under the First Amendment.” School newspaper editors may decide not to run an ad based on content, but court decisions suggest that school officials may not be able to censor ads, Goodman said.

Between the Lines: CyLibris, a gay publishing company in France, has just published a French-language edition of a collection of my gay and AIDS-themed short stories titled Les Fantômes (translation The Ghosts) — in cooperation with “sida, Grande Cause Nationale 2005,” a national French AIDS organization. World AIDS Day is this month (Thursday, December 1) and I hope that we can all take a moment and remember those we have lost from AIDS and what we can continue to do to help fight and bring attention to the ongoing epidemic both in the United States and abroad. In case you are a little curious about how this book came about: A little more than a decade ago, Anne-Laure Hubert, a graduate student in Belgium, translated into French my first collection of short stories, Dancing on the Moon, for her masters thesis. Two years ago, Anne-Laure located me on the Internet and e-mailed me to let me know she had translated my stories and asked if I wanted to see her thesis. For me, it was a truly strange experience — to read and rediscover my early stories (and now in a foreign language) and to revisit many of the issues and themes which seemed to have evaporated from gay life — and my own consciousness. Anne-Laure had several unanswered questions regarding her translation — idioms and footnotes and specifics relating to gay life or life in the U.S. — and together we polished a final translation which we submitted to CyLibris — and this edition really owes a lot to her tremendous faith and understanding of these stories, as well as her acceptance of gay life and the historical impact AIDS has had upon it, particularly in the early years of the epidemic and in the United States. Olivier Gainon and the folks at CyLibris have produced a beautiful edition of these short stories — and if you know any French language speakers or citizens, I hope that you will encourage them to support Cylibris and any French, international, or local AIDS organization this holiday season.

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.

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 http://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"

The buzz: Tommy O’Haver will direct the film version of Edwin John Wintle’s memoir Breakfast With Tiffany, about being a single gay middle-aged New Yorker who suddenly finds himself serving as guardian for his teenage niece Tiffany. The film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film festival in September. Random House will publish Summer Crossing, an early, unreleased Truman Capote novel discovered last year at the bottom of a box of Capote manuscripts and photos that had been the property of the author’s former house sitter. Capote, who died in 1984, had hired the sitter to look after his Brooklyn apartment while he was in Switzerland writing In Cold Blood. In September, the Belper Women’s Institute in England canceled writer Narvel Annable’s appearance when they learned they discovered his books dealt with homosexuality. Annable’s recent book, Lost Lad, is set in the Belper area. U.S. author Ron Suresha had a similar experience when the organizers of Boats, Books and Brushes, a local literary event in his hometown of New London, Connecticut, opted against including an appearance of the openly-gay writer. Following an outcry from social conservatives, Haworth Press canceled the publication of Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West. Conservative activists had complained that one of the book’s chapters, “Pederasty: An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and Empirical Data,” an essay by Bruce L. Rind, an adjunct instructor in psychology at Temple University, amounted to a defense of present-day sexual relationships between men and adolescent boys. This was not the first time that Mr. Rind’s work has come under fire. Six years ago, he and two colleagues were denounced by Congress for writing a paper that, in its critics’ eyes, soft-pedaled the long-term traumatic effects on children of sexual abuse.

Kudos: Ann Beattie is this year’s recipient of the Rea Award for significant achievements in the short story form. Beattie, one of my favorite writers, is the author of the short story collections Distortions, The Burning House, Where You’ll Find Me, Park City, Perfect Recall, and most recently Follies. Beattie has always included thoughtful and well-rounded gay characters in her fiction. Among her finest stories with gay characters are: “The Cinderella Waltz,” “The Burning Bed,” “Second Question,” “The Infamous Fall of Howell the Clown,” and “The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea.”

More news from the Big Easy: PressPassQ reported that the New Orleans-based Ambush magazine will not publish for at least a month, but that its staff is safe, according to staff member Phyllis Denmark who spoke to reporter Eleanor Brown. Publisher Rip Delain-Naquin and his male registered domestic partner, production director Marsha Delain-Naquin, own a three-story building in the French Quarter which houses both the Ambush offices and their home. “We were safe and sound in the building,” Denmark said. “Then on Tuesday the looting started.” Denmark said staff left the city and that the Delain-Naquins are at a relative’s in northern Louisiana. For the last three years Ambush and the Delain-Naquins have hosted the fabulous opening night party for the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival for queer writers.


My Dinner with Andy: Last month I had a chance to have drinks and dinner with Australian/Canadian writer Andy Quan , who was in Manhattan for vacation, work, and to promote his new book Six Positions, now out from Green Candy Press. Andy has been one of my favorite gay writers ever since I read his short story “How to Cook Chinese Rice” in the 1993 anthology Queeries, one of the first books published by the Canadian publishing house Arsenal Pulp Press. Andy writes the kind of stories that other writers wish they could do, but often can’t. “How to Cook Chinese Rice” is about a gay Asian man’s search for identity, multi-layered with irony and witty details — a sort of short, gay version of Like Water for Chocolate. When Andy’s first collection of short stories, Calendar Boy, came out (and it included “How to Cook Chinese Rice”), it snagged a 2001 Lambda Literary nomination for best small press (in spite of being extremely hard to find in the U.S.). What makes Andy’s work so exciting to read is his continual innovation with structure and language — his best work often explores and deconstructs a particular thematic issue of interest to gay men (i.e. muscles in “Something about Muscle,” hair in “Hair,” serostatus in “Positive.”). Among my favorite pieces in Six Positions are “Mistakes were Made,” a disastrous hook-up as seen from both sides of the dating coin, and “Why I’m,” a searing, high-flying manifesto of what it means to be gay and male and alive in the 21st century. Andy also recently (and deservedly) snagged the Best Writer citation from London’s Erotic Awards for Six Positions. As his day job, Andy does international policy work for Australia's national HIV/AIDS organization, and he is also a singer and songwriter — he’s recently released his first CD of music and lyrics, Clean.

Open calls: Gertrude Press, the Portland, Oregon non-profit organization which publishes many gay and lesbian authors in their literary journal Gertrude, will begin publishing limited-edition poetry and fiction chapbooks in 2006, with a letterpress cover and a limited press run of 200 copies. Green Candy Press is seeking essays and memoirs of gay men with gay brothers for a new anthology titled My Gay Brother. Deadline is January 22, 2006. Bookpuppy.co.uk has launched an erotic short story competition. First prize is £100. Deadline is January 1, 2006. See the Web site for details. Forbidden Fruit, a new e-zine, is seeking gay-themed literary erotica. The e-zine will publish three times a year (January, May and September) and have a minimum of eight short stories (or serial extracts) per issue. The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation will be awarding competitive grants for playwriting. Deadline is November 30, 2005. Plays may be full-length, a long one-act, or an evening-long collection of related one-acts. All works must present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner and be based on, or directly inspired by, a historic person, culture, work of art, or event. See the Web site for more details.

On and off the Shelves: Women in Print, the feminist Vancouver bookstore, closed its doors on September 11, 2005. Owners Carol Dale and Louise Hager have been in the book business since the 1960s. They met working at Duthie’s bookstore and then opened their first bookstore, Hager Books, in 1974. Women in Print has been in existence for 12 years and the co-owners plan to continue selling books online at womeninprint.ca. Hager and Dale, both cancer survivors, are also looking forward to dedicating more time to volunteer work.

Hush, hush: The Publishing Triangle will hold a silent auction on Tuesday, October 18 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Remy Toledo Gallery (529 West 20th Street, 8th floor) to benefit The Triangle’s Shilts-Grahn Nonfiction Awards and the Lorde-Gunn Poetry Awards. You will have an opportunity to bid on items such as original artwork, theater tickets, CDs, DVDs, cookbooks, gourmet catering, massages, and much, much more. Mexican hors d’oeuvres will be served, courtesy of La Cocina Mexicana. All proceeds go toward the fund-raising drive for the awards. Also of note: this year the Publishing Triangle will give a new award: The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, open to first-book authors of any age whose work contains queer themes.

Passages: Poet Thomas Avena died August 3, 2005 in San Francisco after a twenty-year battle with AIDS. He was 43 years old. Avena first gained attention with his literary journal, Bastard Review. He was the author of a collection of poems, Dream of Order, and edited Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS, which was awarded the Before Columbus American Book Award and the San Francisco Mayor’s Medal in 1995. He was the editor for “Project Face to Face,” an AIDS oral history and arts installation, and served as the project's writer-in-residence during its exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's Experimental Gallery in 1991. Known for his work on issues of treatment advocacy, he addressed the National Institutes of Health and the Zurich AIDS Congress. He was the recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and the International Humanitas Award for his work in AIDS education and the arts. He was also the author, with Adam Klein, of Jerome: After the Pageant, an exploration of the life and work of the painter Jerome Caja. Mr. Avena's work also appeared in The American Poetry Review and Best American Poetry 1996.

Over the last two years I have made six trips to New Orleans to research material for a novel inspired by the ghosts of the French Quarter and to attend the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, an annual gathering of queer writers. I won’t relay my shock and horror at the unfolding events of this crisis -- many others are at work passionately writing about this already, but I was heartened to receive an e-mail yesterday from Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the mighty hearts behind the Suspect Thoughts Press, which contained a wrap of the whereabouts of several New Orleans writers and their families.

Here’s a repost of their e-mail:

Greg and I decided to do something different this newsletter. Rather than do our usual show and tell about Suspect Thoughts Press, we thought we’d do a show and tell about what we know about the people we love in New Orleans.

And give you some numbers and websites, just in case you don’t already have them, that you can use to locate lost loved ones, offer up a room of one’s own, or make a donation.

As many of you know, Greg and I go to New Orleans each May for Saints & Sinners. The queer literary festival conceived of and made marvelous each year by Paul Willis. But Paul doesn’t work alone and we’ve met so many amazing fellow New Orleanians through him. And I know a lot of you getting this newsletter have met them too. So, here’s what we know.

Author/editor/executive director (of both Saints & Sinners and the Tennessee Williams Festival) extraordinaire Paul Willis and his partner, author/editor/blogger extraordinaire, Greg Herren are safe at Paul’s parents in Illinois. To learn more, please visit Greg’s blog at http://www.livejournal.com/users/scottynola/. (I encourage you to check out the collage of Bush in New Orleans in the comments to Greg’s post of September 2nd under the heading “Until We Meet Again in New Orleans.” Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and our Bush, he plucked while New Orleans drowned.)

Author Poppy Z Brite (Liquor, Prime, and many more) and husband Chris DeBarr are safe at her mother’s house in central Mississippi. Unfortunately, they were only able to take their dog and one of her 28 cats. She hasn’t heard anything about her house in Uptown or her cats yet. You can find out more at Poppy’s blog at http://www.livejournal.com/users/docbrite/. (There is a section of animal rescue sites in the links below.)

Author/bisexual activist/creatix of Mind Caviar and so much more/suspect thoughts journal columnist Jamie Joy Gatto and her partner Ben are safe--but only after witnessing firsthand the hell on earth of New Orleans the last week. They made it to Houston where she and Ben are staying with a fellow bi-activist. She wrote to say that what she and Ben saw was far worse than anything reported on TV. Sage Vivant and M Christian are raising funds for Jamie Joy and Ben through PayPal. [Per Sage: If you'd like to contribute (and honestly, any amount you can spare will be helpful), please go to http://www.paypal.com/ and send money to me (sage@customeroticasource.com), specifying that your payment is for Jamie Joy. PayPal's records will help me keep track of who gave what, and I will then send her a check for the total amount collected along with a list of names who contributed. M. Christian and I would like to send this check no later than September 8.]

Author Elyn Selu (Pretty Is Just a Face I Make) and her husband Brad are safe, but like so many others, including my aunt Gail and her family, their house is under water.

Author Martin Pousson (No, Place Louisiana and Sugar) and his Chihuahua, Butch, are safe and at his parents in Lafayette. Martin doesn’t have a car and didn’t plan on going to the shelters because they weren’t taking dogs. But his parents drove down and got them out Sunday night before Katrina made landfall.

Author Jean Redmann (Lost Daughters, The Intersection of Law and Desire) is safe and staying with friends in Orange, Texas.

Cherry Cappel (web designer extraordinaire who created the Saints & Sinners site) and her partner Beth Blankenship are with friends in Dallas.

Karissa Kary, Paul’s golden right hand at both Saints & Sinners and the Tennessee Williams Foundation--and one of the kindest and most on-the-ball people I’ve ever met, is safe with her boyfriend Rolf in Kansas.

Pat Brady, Saints & Sinners hostess with the mostest and author of Martha Washington: An American Life, is safe and staying with her beau in Hammond, LA.

The family of author Marty Hyatt (A Scarecrow’s Bible), including his mom and aunt, are safe and sound.

The family of New Orleans born-and-bred Patrick Ryan (author and founder and editor-in-chief of Lodestar Quarterly) are safe. Patrick’s mom is going to be staying with him in San Francisco until she can return.

The family of San Francisco’s own Melinda Adams, aka LilyCat, a New Orleans native and a networker, promoter of San Francisco’s various alt-lit communities through nonstop readings and benefits, is safe. She’s organizing a Red Cross benefit in San Francisco this October. To find out more, visit her blog at http://www.livejournal.com/users/mskittywhore/.

And now here’s some of those sites I mentioned earlier if you’d like to locate loved ones, offer up a room of one’s own, or make a donation.

Locating Loved Ones:

Katrina I’m Ok (http://katrina.im-ok.org/)
You can enter phone numbers to let people know you’re okay as well as look for others.

Katrina.com (http://www.katrina.com/)
This site belongs to a woman who has the same name as the hurricane. She got so many requests for information that turned her site into info clearinghouse. Also there are message boards for people locating each other.

Housing:

HurricaneHousing.org (http://www.hurricanehousing.org/)
MoveOn.org created this site. If you have room to offer, post it here.

Donations:

American Red Cross (http://www.redcross.org/) or 1-800-HELP-NOW
Second Harvest (http://www.secondharvest.org/)
Provides food--almost all the money donated goes to just that food, not overhead.
Acorn Institute (http://www.acorn.org/)
This group focused on affordable housing is headquartered in New Orleans, yet it keeps on trying to find housing for others.
Mercy Corps (http://www.mercycorps.org/)
I hadn’t heard of this group before, but they are focused on rebuilding the entire community that has been devastated, not just temporary emergency relief.
Episcopal Relief &Development (http://www.er-d.org/) or 1-800-334-7626
United Methodist Committee on Relief (http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/emergency/hurricanes/2005/) or 1-800-554-8583
Salvation Army (or http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/) or 1-800-SAL-ARMY
Catholic Charities (http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/) or 1-800-919-9338
FEMA Charity tips (http://www.fema.gov/rrr/help2.shtm)
National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (http://www.nvoad.org/)

Animal Rescue:

American Humane Society (http://www.americanhumane.org/)
Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (http://www.la-spca.org/)
North Shore Animal League (http://www.nsalamerica.org/)
EARS (Emergency Animal Rescue Service) (http://www.ears.org/)
Noah's Wish (http://noahswish.com/)

The buzz: Regan Books will publish former New Jersey governor James McGreevey’s untitled book about how he wrestled with politics, family, and his sexuality. Touchstone will publish Disobedience, a first novel by Naomi Alderman, about the reunion of two women who were teenage lovers. Richard Labonté’s Books To Watch Out For reported that Lethe Press and the White Crane Institute, publisher of the White Crain Journal, will reprint 10 queer nonfiction classics, including Andrew Ramer’s Two Flutes Playing, Mark Thompson’s Gay Spirit, the collected works of Edward Carpenter, and previously unpublished writing by the late fairy poet and avant-garde filmmaker James Broughton. A libel lawsuit has been filed against the author, agent, and publisher of the bestselling memoir Running with Scissors. The suit—alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, emotional distress, and fraud—was filed in Middlesex Superior Court by six members of the Turcotte family of Northampton, MA, who maintain that they are the family of the eccentric psychiatrist with whom author Augusten Burroughs lived in his teens. Burroughs renamed them the “Finch” family in the 2002 book, which is being made into a movie due out next year. The family seeks “a public retraction of the book and a public statement that it is fiction and not memoir.” Lestat, the Elton John musical based on Anne Rice’s bestselling Vampire Chronicles, will have its world premiere December 17, 2005 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. The show will open on Broadway in March 2006. Julia Roberts will make her Broadway debut next spring in a revival of Richard Greenberg’s 1997 play Three Days of Rain. Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer prize-winning play, Seascape, will be revived on Broadway in November. Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries, will direct a screen version of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Kenneth Branagh will film a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, with a screenplay by Branagh and author/actor Stephen Fry. Neil Jordan’s movie version of the Patrick Gale’s novel Breakfast at Pluto will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. A film produced, directed, and starring Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), the best-known and most widely translated modern Japanese writer, has been found in a storeroom at Mishima’s home in Tokyo’s Ota Ward. Hiroaki Fujii, who co-produced the film in the 1960s with Mishima, said he found the negative of the film based on Mishima’s 1961 novel Yukoku (Patriotism). The film was made four years before Mishima’s death. Set to music by Wagner, the silent film follows an Imperial Japanese Army lieutenant who commits seppuku, or ritual suicide, rather than take part in a coup attempt. All copies of the movie were thought destroyed, at the request of Mishima’s widow. The film is expected to be released on DVD.

Kudos: Nominees for the newly initiated Quill awards, includes Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs in the memoir/biography category. Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition by Will Roscoe and Queering Creole Spiritual Traditions by Randy P. Conner with David Hatfield Sparks are finalists for the 2005 Ashé Journal Book Award. Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground, winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Open calls: David Olin Tullis, who published and edited The Great Lawn, a gay literary magazine which was published in the 1990s, has launched CreamDrops, a new art and literary journal for gay men. The first three issues are now available online. Last month, The Big Gay Read competition was launched in the UK to find Britain’s favorite gay novel. Coordinated by queerupnorth, commonword, Time to Read, and Manchester, Salford, and Blackpool Library services, the winner will be announced at a special event during the queerupnorth Festival in May 2006. Submissions for the favorite gay novel, which need not be one of the organization’s recommended books, must be in by February, and can be made through the Web site.

On and off the Shelves: In August, Bookselling This Week reported that Alamo Square Distributors (ASDI), a book distributor that specialized in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and sexual alternative market, would close at the end of the month. Shortly thereafter, Bert Herrmann, the founder of ASDI and publisher of Alamo Square Press, announced that he would be opening ASP Wholesale (a division of Alamo Square Press) and expected to be ready for business on September 15. Herrmann had sold ASDI four years ago to buy a retirement home in New Mexico. In an e-mail Hermann wrote, “These are hard times for wholesalers and also particularly hard times for smaller gay/lesbian/sexual alternative presses…. I have devoted much of my life to this industry and I have decided to step back to the plate and try one more time to keep our small presses alive.” In Sweden and Holland, libraries are “lending out people”—volunteers from outside of the mainstream, including gay men and lesbians, who sit in a cafeteria with library patrons, have a cup of coffee, and chat with them about their lives. These “living books” projects are meant to tear down prejudices about different religions, professions, and sexualities.

Up in Arms: In August, 365Gay.com reported that a judge ruled that the Pleasant Valley (Iowa) School Board acted appropriately when it told teachers they may not read to their classes a book with a gay character. The 4-3 vote last December, however, allows the book, The Misfits by James Howe, to be kept in school libraries, but out of the hands of small children. The Misfits is about four 12 year olds, best friends and the target of cruel name-calling who decide they aren’t going to take it anymore. One of the characters in the book is gay. The board’s action followed a complaint from a parent who said that if sexual orientation is part of the curriculum, then the Bible and the Ten Commandments should be read aloud, too. Two other parents appealed the board’s restriction to the state, saying the decision was motivated by “moral or religious reasons.” Iowa state administrative law judge Carol Greta ruled that the board “acted out of the legitimate educational concern of age-appropriateness” when it restricted access to the book. Greta said had the board voted to remove the book entirely from schools the decision would have faced a greater degree of scrutiny. Her ruling noted that “the local board has the authority to determine what curricular materials are appropriate for the different grade levels of students in the district. It did not interpret its statutory authority in an illogical or irrational way.” The ruling does not carry the weight of law and is considered a recommendation.

Passages: Al Carmines, who as assistant rector of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Theatre, helped create the experimental crucible that was the Judson’s Poets’ Theatre, and became one of the seminal forces of the Off-Off Broadway movement, died Aug. 11, 2005 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 69. Alvin Allison Carmines was born in Hampton, Virginia, on July 25, 1936. His father worked as a fishing trawler and his mother was a substitute schoolteacher. Raised as a Protestant, he soon developed a knack for performance, and won a music scholarship. However, he didn’t go into music, but studied theology at Swarthmore. He later enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary. Upon earning his bachelor of divinity, he was hired at Judson Memorial Church. From 1961, when Carmines was hired by Judson’s senior minister Howard Moody and charged with creating a theatre, until 1981, when the effects of an aneurysm forced him to resign, Carmines wrote about 80 musicals, operas, and oratorios. He often played his music in performance and was frequently called upon to act. Carmines wrote several musicals based on the Gertrude Stein’s work, including In Circles, which set the non-linear prose of Stein to ragtime, tango, waltz, opera, barbershop quartet, jazz and other musical styles. For the production, the composer wrote and performed a different opening number every night. The show won Mr. Carmines an Obie Award in 1968. He won other Obies for Home Movies and What Happened in 1964, for Promenade in 1965, and for Sustained Achievement in 1979. Other Stein works musicalized by Carmines include Dr. Faustus Lights The Lights, A Manoir, The Making of Americans, Listen To Me, and What Happened. Another favored theme was gay life. The title of one such Carmines show, 1973’s The Faggot (in which he also appeared as an actor), drew the ire of the gay population. Carmines wrote one musical for Broadway, W.C. Fields, which closed out of town. In 2003, Carmines was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the Publishing Triangle and the Robert Chesley Foundation.

A memorial celebration of the life of gay activist pioneer and journalist Jack Nicols (1938-2005) will be held Sunday, Sept. 25 at 3:00 pm, at New York’s LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. Openly challenging psychiatry’s position at the time that homosexuality was a sickness, in 1961 Nichols and Frank Kameny co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. In 1965, he led the first gay demonstration of a federal building—the White House—and organized the first East Coast ecumenical conference on homosexuality, later called the Washington Area Council on Religion and the Homosexual. In 1967, Nichols was interviewed by Mike Wallace in the first network (CBS) documentary on homosexuality. Nichols wrote four books, including Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (1975), and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (2004). He edited the first gay weekly newspaper, GAY, and as a journalist wrote the columns “The Homosexual Citizen” and “The Homosexual Anarchist.” During the last ten years of his life, he served as the editor for the widely-read online news-journal, GayToday. Speakers at the memorial will include gay pioneer activists Dick Leitsch and Randy Wicker; authors and journalists Charles Kaiser (Gay Metropolis), George Weinberg (Society and the Healthy Homosexual), David Carter (Stonewall), and Perry Brass (How To Survive Your Own Gay Life); as well as Shelbiana Clarke Rhein, sister of Nichol’s long-time companion Lige Clarke.

The buzz: Harpercollins will publish Scott Heim’s new novel, We Disappear, about a meth-addict caring for his ill mother in Kansas. Ballantine will publish three new Rita Mae Brown’s novels: Dueling Grounds, a historical novel in which six old-money Virginia families in the mid-nineteenth century engage in a dangerous contest to see whose eldest son lives longest, and the next two "Sister Jane" foxhunting novels. Joel Defner, who hit it big with Gay Haiku, will publish Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever with Broadway Books. Rose of No Man’s Land, Michelle Tea’s coming of age story about a lonely teenager whose life shifts into overdrive when she befriends a misfit named Rose, will be published by MacAdam/Cage.

Kudos: Lesbian poet May Swenson’s portrait will soon hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Swenson was born in Utah in 1913 and died in 1989 in Delaware at the age of 76 and published 11 volumes of poetry. The 1960 portrait, in pastels and on paper, is by gay artist Beauford Delaney, a friend of Swenson’s. The National Portrait Gallery brought the portrait from the poet’s literary estate in May. Poet Eloise Klein Healey received Antioch University’s Horace Mann Award. Mann was the first president of the university, founded in 1852. Healey is the founding chair of Antioch’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Her most recent collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lord/Publishing Triangle Poetry Award.

Open calls: Hand.tooth.nail, a new literary e-zine, is now accepting submissions of poetry, prose and fiction. Kirkus Reviews is launching the annual Virginia Kirkus Literary Award for the best unpublished first novel or short story collection. Deadline is November 1, 2005 and the submission fee is $150. The Rauxa Prize carries an award of $1000 given annual to an erotic short story of exceptional literary quality. Nominations are due by September 15, 2005
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On and off the Shelves: A new gay bookstore has opened in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC. G Books, 1520 U Street, NW, sells trade used and new gay books, magazines, movies, and music. John David Hinkle has opened gay-friendly John David’s Lightly Used Books in Lansing, Michigan. After many years and a lot of different jobs in Chicago (including writing a column for Gay Chicago Magazine), Hinkle plans to have the store serve as a meeting place for local groups and as a "no-hate zone." "If this town can support four gay bars, they can support me," Hinkle told a reporter for the Lansing State Journal. Seattle’s Beyond the Closet closed its doors on July 28, 2005. Owner Ron Whiteaker told the Seattle Gay News that declining sales, Internet discounting, and "armchair buying" contributed to the store’s closing after 17 years. The Women’s Review of Books, which ceased publication last December, will resume publication in January 2006. The magazine will return as a bi-monthly and with the same editor, Amy Hoffman. Wellesley will co-sponsor the publication along with Old City Publishing.

Up in Arms: In July, the Anderson County School Board of Tennessee decided Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, was too off-color for 13-year-olds enrolled in a summer reading course. Parents voiced concerns to board members and school officials about graphic passages dealing with rape and incest and didn’t want their kids in the class if and when the book was discussed. Walker’s novel was suggested by the teacher as summer reading to coincide with student interest in the Michael Jackson trial. The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) reported in July that an application was filed to ban the theatrical release of the film version of Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin due to the pedophilia story line. Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the movie a R18+ rating, describing the film as "a serious and legitimate exploration of a disturbing and confronting theme."

Passages: British novelist and screenwriter Gavin Lambert died July 17, 2005, of pulmonary fibrosis in Los Angeles. He was 80 years old. Lambert works include Inside Daisy Clover (novel and screenplay), The Slide Area, GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson, The Ivan Moffat File: Life Among the Beautiful and Damned in London, Paris, New York and Hollywood, On Cukor, Norma Shearer: A Life, and Natalie Wood, A Life in Seven Takes. Born in Sussex, England, on July 23, 1924, Lambert attended Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became friends with aspiring filmmakers Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, with whom he co-founded and co-edited the film journal Sequence in 1947. From 1949 to 1955, Lambert edited the film journal Sight and Sound before writing his first film Another Sky, which he also directed. In 1961, Lambert wrote the screen adaptation, along with Jan Read, of Tennessee Williams's The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which starred Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty. He penned another Williams adaptation in 1989, the TV version of Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mark Harmon. Lambert became a U.S. citizen in 1964 and was twice nominated for awards by both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Writers Guild of America: for the 1960 screen adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, which he wrote with T.E.B. Clarke, and 1977's adaptation of the I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which he wrote with Lewis John Carlino.

The buzz: In a recent interview with Leslie Robinson in Bay Windows, retired Colonel Grethe Cammermeyer (Serving in Silence) mentioned she is at work on a new book, tentatively titled Living in Ambiguity, tackling "how we challenge people to think outside their familiar biases." Associated Press reported that author Terry McMillan (How Stella Got Her Groove Back) has filed for divorce after learning her husband was gay and believing that he had married her only to get his U.S. citizenship. Pages magazine reported that author Michael Cunningham’s next project is a Universal Pictures screenplay for Julia Roberts, based on Lolly Winston’s novel Good Grief, about how a young woman copes after the death of her husband. Actor and author Rupert Everett will be the voice of the Fox in the upcoming big screen adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Author and actor Alan Cumming will join the Showtime series The L Word during its third season. Variety reported that the start date of the movie version of Hairspray has been delayed; the film’s producers are now wooing Rob Marshall (Chicago) as director. Eddie Murphy, Beyonce Knowles, and Jamie Foxx will star in the big screen version of Dreamgirls, directed by Bill Condon. Doug Wright, the Tony-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife, is the librettist for the new musical Grey Gardens, adapted from the documentary about Edith and Edie Bouvier. The musical will premiere during Playwrights Horizon’s 2005-2006 season in Manhattan, along with Miss Witherspoon by Christopher Durang, Pen by David Marshall Grant, and Sarah Schulman’s Manic Flight Reaction. Jon Marans, a Pulitzer-prize-winning finalist for Old Wicked Songs, debuted a new play titled The Tempermentals about Mattachine founder Harry Hay at the recent Moral Values Festival in New York. Chamberlain Bros. will publish Saturday Night at the Baths by Steve Ostrow. Ostrow, the founder of the Continental Baths in the Ansonia Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, helped repeal New York’s laws against homosexuality and turned a gay bathhouse into one of the hot nightspots of the ‘70s that was instrumental in the careers of Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, and a host of others. Cleis Press co-publisher Felice Newman is now syndicating a biweekly lesbian sex column titled "Whole Lesbian Sex" available in both PG-13 and X-rated versions.

More buzz on Lambda: Eleanor Brown reported in the June issue of Press Pass Q that the James White Review was close to finding a new home. The quarterly gay men’s literary magazine, under the auspices of the Lambda Literary Foundation, recently suspended publication. The JWR began in the summer of 1984 and was taken over by LLF in 1998.

Kudos: Sugar Rush, Julie Burchill’s controversial about schoolgirls discovering lesbian love, was shortlisted for a for the British Booktrust Teenage Prize. Robert Taylor’s novel, Whose Eye Is on Which Sparrow? won the 2005 Independent Publishers Book Award for the best book of the year with a gay or lesbian theme, including both fiction and nonfiction.

Open calls: Project QueerLit #2 has begun, and is open to all first-time novelists with queer, bent, or outsider worldview content. Novel submissions will be accepted from September 1-December 31, 2005. Winners will be announced in December 31, 2006. Visit http://www.projectqueerlit.com/ for more details. The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation grants for 2005 will be for Playwrighting. All works must present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner and be based on, or directly inspired by, a historic person, culture, work of art, or event. All works (Drama or Comedy or Musical) submitted must be unpublished, original, and in English. Adaptations or translations of other works are not acceptable. Plays may be full-length, a long one-act, or an evening-long collection of related one-acts. All submissions must be postmarked by midnight November 30, 2005. All works selected by the judges will be announced in Spring 2006. Visit http://www.aabbfoundation.org/ for more details.

Love, Uncovered: An unpublished love poem written 2,600 years ago by the Greek poet Sappho, the "10th muse," debuted in the Times Literary Supplement in June 2005. The poem was discovered in 2004. The 12-line poem, only the fourth to have been recovered, was rediscovered after researchers at Germany’s Cologne University identified a papyrus once wrapped around an Egyptian mummy as part of a third century B.C. roll containing poems by Sappho. They noticed that some of the verse fragments on the crumbling Cologne material matched parts of lines already identified as Sappho’s on a papyrus discovered in 1922. By combining the two they were able to reconstruct the original, adding likely missing words in the gaps that remained. In the newly published verses, originally sung to music, Sappho laments the passing of time as she compares the youthful bodies of dancing girls to her own weak knees and white hair. The first four lines of the translated verses read: "You for the fragrant-bosomed Muses’ lovely gifts,/Be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:/But my once tender body old age now/Has seized; my hair’s turned white instead of dark."

On the Shelves: A new GLBT bookstore opened in June in Omaha, Nebraska. Books, magazines, gourmet coffee, music, authors, artists, and speakers are on the menu at The Reading Grounds, 3928 Farnam Street. The Taipei Times reported that Gin Gin’s, the GLBT bookstore in Taipei, celebrated Gay and Lesbian Pride Month in June by moving to a new, larger location. The bookstore was recently found guilty of selling "indecent material." "These setbacks, however, only reinforced the need to keep the bookstore open for the gay community," owner Lai Jeng-jer told a reporter from the newspaper. Gin Gin’s has been in business since January 1999.

Passages: Jean O’Leary, a Democratic activist and leader of the early lesbian feminist movement, died June 5, 2005, at the age of 57 in San Clemente, CA. The cause was lung cancer. Born in Kingston, NY in 1948, O’Leary entered a convent as a teenager and her story was a much-discussed chapter in the book Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. She left and joined the Gay Activists Alliance shortly after the Stonewall riots and soon helped branched off to help found the Lesbian Feminist Liberation. In 1974, O’Leary joined Bruce Voeller at the National Gay Task Force and became co-executive director. O’Leary organized the first White House meeting on sexual orientation, a three-hour session between leaders and Carter aide Midge Constanze in 1977. In 1988, O’Leary, along with Rob Eichberg, created National Coming Out Day. She is survived by her partner, Lisa Phelps, and two children.

With articles today in Bookselling this Week and The New York Blade, a clearer picture is emerging on the potential restructuring of the Lambda Literary Foundation. Nomi Schwartz reported in BTW that the changes were due to "the pending sale of the building housing [the Foundation] offices, combined with the consistently precarious financial state of the Foundation throughout its history," according to a statement from the Foundation’s board. While the Lambda Book Report and the James White Review will suspend publication, the Board intends to continue its author reading series and the Lambda Literary Awards. A more detailed story in The Blade by Rhonda Smith reveals Jim Marks served as executive director of the Foundation since May 1996 except for an 18 month period from April 2001 to December 2002. Although the changes are precipitated by the Foundation’s finances, Marks was quoted in the article as saying that 2005 revenue was up about 25 percent for the first five months of the year. Marks told Smith that the organization is “a little bit over a $200,000-a-year business.” The Blade also reported that it is unclear whether the Lambda Literary Foundation’s headquarters will continue to be based in Washington, D.C.

On a personal note, I've always had a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for Jim Marks because of the gargantuan tasks he has faced keeping the Foundation running and consider him a good friend and a huge supporter of gay literature at a time when those supporters seem to be diminishing. I've also enjoyed being a part of the LBR and working with Jonathan Harper and Lisa Moore and I look forward to working with all of them in possible future venues.

Things seem to be rapidly changing at the Lambda Literary Foundation. On Tuesday of this week, the Washington D.C. staff of the Lambda Book Report was dismissed. I heard of this on Wednesday, when one of the staff members called me to ask if I would provide a job recommendation. (And which I promised that, of course, I would do whatever I could.) It seems that the future of the LBR, James White Review, and LLF-sponsored writers conference may be suspended, although the Foundation may continue the Lambda Literary Awards. On Thursday, I was contacted by a remaining board member of the Lambda Literary Foundation to clarify what had transpired at the offices regarding the Foundation's Executive Director Jim Marks. On Friday, I received the following e-mail from the Foundation. Stay tuned for further developments.

"Jim Marks tendered his resignation as Executive Director to take effect on July 1, 2005. The Board acknowledges that Jim has been key--indeed, vital--in the work of theorganization and extends its heartfelt and profound appreciation to Jim for his dedication and hard work over the years. We wish every good fortune to Jim in his future pursuits. Remaining Board Members Jim Duggins, Katherine V. Forrest, Karla Jay, and Don Weise of the Lambda LiteraryFoundation's Board of Trustees are evaluating the impact of this resignation and factoring it into other structural plans discussed at the June 3, 2005 Board meeting. It is expected that other announcements will be forthcoming."

Last night in New York City at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies ofthe City Univesity of New York on Fifth Avenue, the Lambda Literary Foundation presented their annual awards for best books. Lea DeLaria did a magnificent job hosting the awards and the Lambda production team headed by Ben Hodges did a terrific job of making it a special evening for all involved.

Gay Men's Debut Fiction
Clay's Way by Blair Mastbaum, Alyson Publications

Gay Men's Fiction
The Master by Colm Toibin, Scribner

Lesbian Debut Fiction
Crybaby Butch by Judith Frank, Firebrand Books

Lesbian Fiction
A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo, Houghton Mifflin

Lesbian Poetry
Sweet to Burn by Beverly Burch, Gival Press

Gay Men's Poetry
Written in Water by Luis Cernuda, City Lights Publishers

Lesbian Mystery
Hancock Park by Katherine V. Forrest, Berkley Prime Crime

Gay Men's Mystery
Flight of Aquavit by Anthony Bidulka, Insomniac Press

Fiction Anthology
Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction edited by Donald Weise, Carroll & Graff

Nonfiction Anthology
I Do/I Don't: Queers on Marriage edited by Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, Suspect Thoughts Press

Memoir/Autobiography
Name All the Animals by Alison Smith, Scribner

Biography
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux, W.W. Norton

Erotica
Best Gay Erotica 2005 edited by Richard Labonte, Cleis Press

Romance
Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger, HarperCollins

Children's/Young Adult
So Hard to Say by Alex Sanchez, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Humor
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris, Little, Brown

Religion/Spirituality
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love by Will Roscoe, Suspect Thoughts Press

Drama/Theater
I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Faber and Faber

Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror
The Ordinary by Jim Grimsley, Tor

Transgender/GenderQueer
The Gender Frontier by Mariette Pathy Allen, Kehrer Verlag

Visual Arts/Photography
At Ease: Navy Men of World War II by Evan Bachner, Harry Abrams

LGBT Studies
For the Love of Women: Gender, Identity and Same-Sex Relations in a Greek Provincial Town by Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Routledge

The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation winners for Short Fiction were presented to Quiara Alegria Hudes, Dennis Jordan, and C. Kevin Smith.

The Independent LGBT Press Award was presented to Bella Books.

The Editor’s Choice Award was presented to Richard Canning for Hear Us Out (Columbia University Press).

The buzz: The London Daily Mail reported that Time Warner has acquired the rights to Rupert Everett’s memoirs for $1.8 million, which reportedly includes not only details of his Hollywood career but his stint as a male prostitute. Anne Rice’s next book will not be about vampires, but Jesus. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, due out in November from Random House, will tell the story of Jesus in his own words. Universal and Red Wagon have optioned Augusten Burrough’s forthcoming memoir of his reconciliation with his abusive father. Warner Brothers has optioned Mike Albo’s novel The Underminer. Brian Singer will direct the film version of Randy Shilt’s book about San Francisco politician-activist Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street. Lily Tomlin will be part of the all-star cast of Robert Altman’s movie of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Isabelle Huppert, Helen Mirren, and Dennis Hopper will star in the film adaptation of Susan Sontag’s novel In America. MTV Networks’ forthcoming gay channel Logo and LPI Media (Publisher of Advocate and Out magazines) have formed a partnership to created cobranded television specials and an online news service. The first special is expected to air in the late fall of 2005. CBS has picked up Flesh & Blood, a new sitcom from writer Joe Keenan. Stockard Channing and Henry Winkler will star. Variety reported that Fannie Flagg’s novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe is being turned into a drama headed for the Broadway stage.

Kudos: Andrew Sean Greer, the 34-year-old author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli, won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, given annually to an emerging author. Tony Kushner was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May. The Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans inducted Patrick Califia, Jim Grimsley, Ellen Hart, and Carol Seajay into their Hall of Fame. Ellen DeGeneres won her second consecutive Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show and her first as Outstanding Talk Show Host. She has also signed to do six more seasons. Stockard Channing won for Outstanding Performance in a Family Special for Jack, about TV adaptation of A.M. Home’s novel about a father who comes out of the closet. Actress Cherry Jones was cited with an Obie Award for her performance in John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt. Winners for the Arch and Bruce Foundation short fiction competition are: First Prize: Quiara Alegria Hudes of Pennsylvania for "Stargazers," Dennis Jordan of New York City for "Sweet Jermone," and C. Kevin Smith of Big Sur, California for "Not the Last of the Mohicans." Second Prize went to Joel A. Nichols of Philadelphia for "Angels on Water" and Wendell Ricketts of San Francisco for "Speedos and a Sweatshirt." Third Prize honors went to Donna Barr of Bremerton, Washington for "A Good Example," Carolyn Gage of Portland, Maine for "Entr’acte," Veronica Holtz of Philadelphia for "A Respectful Distance," Neil Ellis Orts of Houston, Texas for "Men Dancing," and Donald Yonker of New York City for "Everything I Know I Learned from Musical Comedy." Edmund White was named one of the Scholars & Writers at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.

Kerouac, past and present: A bobble-head doll of author Jack Kerouac, created as a promotion by the minor-league team, the Lowell Spinners, joined the collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame in May. It is believed to be the first literary figure so honored. The bobble-head was unveiled at the ball game of August 21, 2003 to honor the Lowell-native and helped raised more than $10,000 for Jack Kerouac Scholarships. Also recently unearthed from a New Jersey warehouse was Beat Generation, a unpublished play by Kerouac. The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fueled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter eager. Kerouac’s biographer Gerald Nicosia reported that the play was written in one day after the author had returned to his home in Florida following the publication of On The Road. An off-Broadway producer named Leo Gavin had expressed interest in a play. The play was never published or performed, but the third act became the basis for a film, Pull My Daisy, starring poet Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, said the play had been submitted to several producers but was turned down. Kerouac also sent the play to Marlon Brando. Brando never responded and the two men only met once, in 1960, when Kerouac enrolled in the Actor’s Studio. After 15 minutes of the class, Kerouac asked, "Don’t they give you any drinks in this place?" Spotting Brando, he invited him for a drink. Brando refused. The play will be published in October by Thunders Mouth Press and a staged reading is scheduled for New York in January 2006. Mr. Nicosia told a reporter from the London Guardian that it was not unusual for work by Kerouac to remain unpublished. "A lot of Jack’s greatest works were never published in his lifetime. The Kerouac estate has been releasing stuff from the archives over the last 10 years... He had a brief moment in the sun, but the right wing launched a major attack on him. They saw him as a major threat to society. They really succeeded in knocking him down."

Attacks Continue: The New York Times reported in an early June 2005 article that according to the American Library Association, which asks school districts and libraries to report efforts to ban books by having them removed from shelves or reading lists, that 547 books were challenged in 2004, up from 458 in 2003. Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she told the Times. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected. And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year." The Oklahoma house approved a $6.68 million budget for state libraries in May and vowed to study local library policies on the placement of gay themed books on children’s shelves. Sally Kearn, a member of the house subcommittee that funds the libraries, had threatened to withhold extra funding for libraries over the issue o gay-themed books. Earlier in the month, the Oklahoma house voted overwhelmingly to recommend creating adult-only sections in all public libraries to shield children from gay-themed books. In late April, police in the Boston suburb of Lexington, MA arrested a father after he refused to leave his six-year-old son’s elementary school over a book that featured a gay family. The father spent the night in jail and was freed after being ordered off school property. Also in late April, Chris Crain, editorial director of the Window media newspaper chain which operates the Washington Blade and Southern Voice, among other newspapers, was beaten by seven men in Amsterdam while he was walking hand-in-hand with his boyfriend early one morning. "I hope our gay friends in Holland realize that it’s a bit too soon to declare victory and go home, now that they’ve won their legal battles," Crain wrote in a subsequent editorial in his newspapers. "Winning the hearts and minds of the people will be a much more challenging task."

Off the Shelves: Cuttyhunk, Boston’s 12-year old gay bookstore, will close in late summer of 2005. Formerly known as We Think the World of You, owner Paul Rehme will close the store to "seek new challenges, including the creation of an exciting new real estate company," as relayed on the bookstore’s Web site. The 18 year-old Tomes & Treasures, the Tampa gay bookstore, gift shop, and coffee house located for the last eight years at its current S. Howard Avenue location, closed in June 2005. Owner Bill Kanouff told the St. Petersburg Times that large bookstore chains, the Internet, and the "mainstreaming of gay culture" helped bring about the store’s demise.

Passages: Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who partnered with director James Ivory to create the award-winning adaptations of E.M. Forster’s novels A Room With a View, Maurice, and Howards End, died May 25, 2005 in London. He was 68. Born in 1936 in what was then Bombay, Mr. Merchant moved to New York in 1958 and earned a master’s in business administration at New York University. His professional partnership with Mr. Ivory continued for 44-years. Mr. Ivory survives him, as do four sisters: Saherbanu Kabadia and Ruksana Khan, both of Mumbai; Sahida Retiwala of Bergenfield, N.J.; and Rashida Bootwala of Pune, India.

Activist and author Jack Nichols died on May 2, 2005, in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 67. The cause was complications of cancer. Nichols was born in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 1938, and came out as gay to his parents as a teenager. Along with Frank Kameny, Nichols founded the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy group, in Washington in 1961. In 1967, Mr. Nichols became one of the first Americans to talk openly about his homosexuality on national television when he appeared in the CBS documentary "’The Homosexuals." For years Nichols was one of the activists who campaigned to have the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. In 1969, after moving to New York, Mr. Nichols founded Gay, the first gay weekly newspaper in the United States, with his companion, Lige Clarke (who died in 1975). Until recently, Nichols also edited the online publication GayToday.com. Among Mr. Nichols’s books are Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin, 1975); The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus, 1996); and The Tomcat Chronicles: Erotic Adventures of a Gay Liberation Pioneer (Harrington Park Press, 2004), which was nominated for a 2004 Lambda Literary Award in the Memoir/Autobiography category.

This year's Saints and Sinners Literary Festival for Queer writers was again a lot of fun. (Thanks again to Paul Willis for his great organizing efforts.) It all began when I had a little too much to drink at the opening reception on Friday night, but I sobered up in time for Saturday's panel on Writing Sex Scenes for Erotica and Romance (with the help of pain killers and a yoga class). Amie M. Evans did a great job moderating and my fellow panelists included Robert Taylor, Radclyffe, and Kelly McQuain. Sunday's What is Taboo panel went well, too, with Rob Stephenson keeping us all on our toes with one question after the next. Also on the panel were Bill Brent, Jim Gladstone, and Sean Meriwether. It was great to see and catch up with a lot of friends and fellow writers and I'm looking forward to going again next year, when rumor has it that it will be integrated into the larger Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in March. To see the crew at this year's events, D. Travers Scott (whose new book One of These Things Is Not Like the Other is just out) has some photos posted at his blog, and Michael Walker of Dreamwalker Group has posted a few of our faces, too.

On May 10, 2005, the Publishing Triangle presented their literary awards in New York City at the New School Auditorium in the Village.

The winners were:

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago Press)

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Alison Smith, Name All the Animals (Scribner)

The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Adam Berlin, Belmondo Style (St. Martin's Press)

The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Stacey D'Erasmo, A Seahorse Year (Houghton Mifflin)

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry
Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love (Farrar Strauss Giroux)

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Maureen Seaton, Venus Examines Her Breast (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

The Robert Chesley Foundation presented its 2004 awards in Playwriting to Michael Kearns (Lifetime Achievement Award) and Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas (Emerging Artist). The recipient of the 2005 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement was Edward Field. In addition, the Publishing Triangle presented a special Leadership Award to The Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest and oldest lesbian archive in the world.

My interview with author Harlan Greene (Why We Never Danced the Charleston and What the Dead Remember) is now on-line at The Forward about his new novel The German Officer’s Boy, about Herschel Grynszpan. On November 7, 1938, Herschel, a 17-year old Jewish youth living illegally in Paris, walked into the German embassy and shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat. The assassination triggered Kristallnacht, the organized Nazi pogrom against the Jewish community inside the boundaries of Third Reich and was the symbolic beginning of the Holocaust. I read an early draft of the novel the year it was one of the winners of the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation competition (then titled The Lost Light). Greene’s vivid, complex novel details the affair between Herschel and Ernst and Herschel’s subsequent time at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and it is a masterful weaving of deception, twists, cover-ups, politics, and public relations ploys during Herschel’s confinement.

I may be biased here (because he was the editor of my recent collection of short stories), but Kevin Bentley’s new memoir, Let’s Shut out the World, is simply divine. On a trip to San Francisco last year I heard Kevin tell his story (over cocktails on the deck of his partner's house in the Russian River) of visiting the miracle dirt chapel in New Mexico and it was both hilarious and magical and I was delighted to find it included in the book. The narrative essays are both comic and poignant, and I particularly enjoyed the title story of how one woman and one house can contain both the elements of lesbian history and unimaginable clutter and the final essay "Party of Two" about Bentley’s current partner Paul. Bravo!

The buzz: Columbia Pictures has optioned the film rights of Marc Acito’s Lammy-nominated debut novel How I Paid for College. Director David Yates has backed out of the new big-screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to direct the next Harry Potter film. A Hans Christian Anderson bio pic is in the works, to be directed by Swedish filmmaker Billie August. The cast of the film version of Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener now includes Bobby Cannavale, Robin Williams, Toni Collette, Rory Culkin, and Joe Morton. Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s stage musical Lestat, based on Anne Rice’s pansexual vampire, will open in San Francisco this winter en route to Broadway. Another Elton John musical, Billy Elliot, based on the movie of the same name, is scheduled to start previews May 31 in London. Carroll & Graf will publish The Sluts, Dennis Cooper’s new novel about a gay male hustler and his client’s obsessions with him. Rob Weisbach has been named president and chief executive officer of Miramax Books, which will be managed over the next two years by executives representing both the Walt Disney Co. and Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Weisbach will also sign up authors for an imprint that will be part of the Weinsteins’ new venture, tentatively named WeinsteinCo.

Kudos: The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation presented writer-director Bill Condon (Kinsey and Gods and Monsters) with the Stephen F. Kolzak Award in Los Angeles in April. The award is named for a successful Los Angeles casting director who devoted the last part of his life to fighting AIDS-phobia and homophobia in the entertainment industry. Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs was named a Book Sense Honor Book for 2004 in Nonfiction. Jim Grimsley was one of eight authors who received the 2005 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The award will presented in May in New York City.

Everything Old is New Again: The first known recording of poet Allen Ginsberg reading Howl was donated by California-based Pacifica Radio to Naropa University. The recording was made in 1956. The donation also includes audio recordings by James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Dylan Thomas, and Aldous Huxley. Ginsberg was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets at Naropa, a nonprofit school that is inspired by Buddhism and located in Boulder, Colorado. The New York Times reported in April that a previously unknown poem by playwright Tennessee Williams was discovered in the back of a small blue test booklet from Washington University in St. Louis. Williams penned the poem, “Blue Song,” while taking a final exam in Greek in May 1937 at the University. The poem was discovered by Harvey I. Schvey, a Washington University professor, among the Williams-related materials kept at Faulkner House Books, a bookstore in New Orleans. A portion of the poem reads: “If you should meet me upon a/ street do not question me for/ I can tell you only my name/ and the name of the town I was/ born in . . .”

Maybe Blogging’s Not Such A Bad Idea: A diary of the novelist Yukio Mishima that is on display at the Yukio Mishima Literary Museum in Yamanakako, Yamanashi Prefecture in Japan is believed to have provided material for his later novels, contradicting previous theories on his work. The diary was kept from 1946 to 1947 when the author was a student in the law department at the University of Tokyo. The diary details the writer’s efforts to become a novelist, his relationship with another writer, Osamu Dazai, and his reunion with a woman who is believed to be the model for “Sonoko,” a character in Confessions of a Mask. “The diary suggests that he drew material from what he actually experience,” Professor Hideaki Sato of Kinki University, an expert on Mishima’s works, reported. The diary, originally begun as an account ledger, also describes the films the writer saw, his railway fares, admission fees to theaters, and the prices of books he bought. According to experts, the author did not record his income and expenditures for the purpose of being thrifty but to see how much money he would need to survive as a writer. Masayoshi Kudo, chief curator at the museum, believes that Mishima made up his mind to join the Finance Ministry as a bureaucrat because he deemed manuscript fees would be insufficient to cover his living expenses. In June 1946, while he was still a student, Mishima published his first novel, Tabako (Cigarette), in a literary magazine.

Off the Shelves: The Open Book, Ltd., the nine-year old bookstore in Sacramento, is in the process of being sold and is no longer accepting orders on its Web site until further notice. The owners Ron Grantz and Larry Bailey, both 65, are retiring to remodel apartments, travel, and “fade into the sunset.” In April 2004, Bailey told a reporter from the Sacramento Bee that “it just doesn’t pay to be a gay business in Lavender Heights, at least not like it used to. Greater social acceptance means greater business competition.” “There’s no ‘us and them’ attitude anymore,” his partner, Grantz said. “People from around the area used to come in on the weekends and spend $200 to $300 in one trip. They don’t do that anymore. Why should they drive all that way when you can get the same book at Barnes & Noble in Elk Grove?

My interview with author and editor Jim Gladstone about his new tattoo-themed gay fiction anthology Skin and Ink is now on line at Velvet Mafia. Jim is a terrific, enthusiastic, and gracious guy who I always enjoy hanging out with in his hometown of Philadelphia (where he has a terrific, huge apartment) or at places like Saints and Sinners in New Orleans. Rob Stephenson, Patrick Ryan, D. Travers Scott, James Williams, and Kal Cobalt also have great new fiction up in this issue of Velvet Mafia. I also love to help writers find new outlets for their work and I read Tom Cardamone’s Pacific Rimming in an early draft and thought it was superb. I’m so glad VM boss Sean Meriwether decided to put it on line. Part One is in this issue and Part Two will be in the next VM issue. Tom will also have a surreal story titled "Bottomfeeders" going up on line this summer at Sean’s other literary Web site, Outsider Ink.

Lammy Finalists Read at NY Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

The Lambda Literary Foundation invites you to "Voices of New York: An Evening of Lambda Literary Finalists Readings." This free event takes place on Thursday, April 28th, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. at the NY Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, located at 208 West 13th St, NY NY 10011. The featured authors will be reading from their books, all finalists for the upcoming Lambda Literary Awards for achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender writing.

The event combines the talents of a diverse collection of writers including:

Colm Tóibín, The Master (Gay Men's Fiction Finalist)
Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (Biography Finalist)
Susan Stinson, Venus of Chalk (Lesbian Fiction Finalist)
Aaron Krach, Half-Life (Gay Men's Debut Fiction Finalist)
Mark Wunderlich, Voluntary Servitude (Gay Men's Poetry Finalist)
Amy King, Antidotes for an Alibi (Lesbian Poetry Finalist)
Andrea Barnet, All-Night Party (LGBT Studies Finalist)
Morty Diamond, From the Inside Out (Transgender Finalist)
K. Warnock, Best Lesbian Erotica 2004 (Erotica Finalist)
Will Fabro, Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Men's Fiction (Fiction Anthology Finalist)

The New York Times reported yesterday that a previously unknown poem by playwright Tennessee Williams was discovered in the back of a small blue test booklet from Washington University in St. Louis. Williams penned the poem, "Blue Song," while taking a final exam in Greek in May 1937 at the University. The poem was discovered by Harvey I. Schvey, a Washington University professor, among the Williams-related materials kept at Faulkner House Books, a bookstore in New Orleans. A portion of the poem reads: "If you should meet me upon a/ street do not question me for/ I can tell you only my name/ and the name of the town I was/ born in . . . To read more of Williams, the poet, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams in 2002.

The buzz: Republican strategist Mary Matalin’s new conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster, Threshold, has acquired its first manuscript. It is a memoir by Mary Cheney, lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Among the new books lined up at Caroll & Graf are Michelango Signorile’s Hitting Hard, a look at gay rights, the Republican Party, and sexual hypocrisy in America, and Jaffe Cohen’s Tush, a gay, comic, romance novel about a loveless astrologer searching for love in Provincetown. Harper’s Children will publish Margaret Cho’s young adult novel, I Hate Girls. Inner Ocean will publish 50 Ways to Support Lesbian and Gay Equality: The Complete Guide to Supporting Family, Friends, Neighbors or Yourself, edited by Meredith Maran and Angela Watrous, with essays from Margaret Cho, Judy Shepard, Candace Gingrich, and leaders of organizations including ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and GLAAD. Spinsters Ink, which shuttered at the end of 2004 after publishing no new books for two years, has been acquired by Bella Books, a Florida-based publisher of lesbian books. Some Spinsters Ink titles will be made available once again and the house plans to release six new titles in 2005. The spring 2005 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review was a special issue devoted to Walt Whitman. Among the contributors were Mark Doty and Rafael Campo. Rumors are flying that with the breakup of Disney and Miramax and the folding of Miramax Books into Disney’s Hyperion imprint, the former Miramax team is wooing Rob Weisbach, currently Simon & Schuster’s editor-at-large, to head up a new book division for the soon-to-be-independent-again film company. Gus Van Sant is in negotiations to direct the film version of The Time Travelers Wife for New Line Cinema. Playbill.com reported that playwright Jon Robin Baitz will write an episode of the hit ABC series Alias. Author-comedienne-mogul Rosie O’Donnell has launched a blog. She can now be found at "formerly rosie" (http://onceadored.blogspot.com/), the "unedited rantings of a fat 42-year-old menopausal ex-talk show host married mother of four."

Kudos: Alan Hollinghurst was recently nominated for the Reader’s Digest Author of the Year, part of the British Book Awards. Alison Smith’s memoir, Name All the Animals, won the 2004 Barnes & Noble Great New Writers Award for nonfiction. Ha Jin won the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for the second time for War Trash, a historical novel of Chinese prisoners of war imprisoned by Americans during the Korean War. Adrienne Rich won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004. Lawrence Ferlinghetti won the Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing given by the Association of American Publishers. Ferlinghetti is the poet, activist, and founder of City Lights Publishers, which made national headlines in 1956 with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. Ferlinghetti was arrested for obscenity and a landmark First Amendment case followed. City Light authors also include Jack Kerouac and Paul Bowles. The Ellen DeGeneres Show scored 11 daytime Emmy nominations, including Best Talk Show Host. The 17th annual Publishing Triangle Awards will be presented May 10 in New York City. A Lifetime Achievement award will be presented to poet Edward Field. A special leadership award will be presented to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The finalists of books published in 2004 are: David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, and Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. The nominees for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction are Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Life of Audre Lorde, Alison Smith, Name All the Animals, and Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life. The nominees for the Ferro-Grumley Award for Men’s Fiction are Adam Berlin, Belmondo Style, Colm Tóibín, The Master, and Jim Tushinski, Van Allen’s Ecstasy. The Women’s Fiction nominees are Stacey D’Erasmo, A Seahorse Year, Emma Donoghue, Life Mask, and Heather Lewis, Notice. The Publishing Triangle Award for Gay Male Poetry nominees are Ron Mohring, Survivable World, Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love, and D. A. Powell, Cocktails. The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry nominees are Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Year of the Snake, and Maureen Seaton, Venus Examines Her Breast. The Robert Chesley Foundation will also present a Lifetime Achievement in Playwriting to Michael Kearns and an Emerging Artist award to Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas.

Anti-Gay Agenda Revisited: Alabama Rep. Gerald Allen (R-Cottondale) announced in March that he did not expect any action to be taken on the bill that would prohibit state funds from purchasing literature that acknowledges homosexuality or written by gay authors. The bill is currently in the Alabama House Crimes and Offenses Committee because of ongoing debates on the state’s fiscal year 2006 budgets.

More than a triangle: The Associated Press reported that a defamation lawsuit was filed in March against the author and publisher of Out of Control, a book about a Houston-area dentist convicted of murder for running over her cheating husband. Julie Knight, a close friend of the mistress of Dr. David Harris, alleges the book is "filled with lies, slander and accusations" against Knight. Knight seeks unspecified damages and attorney’s fees. Harris was killed in 2002 when he was run over repeatedly by a car driven by his wife, Clara Harris. The book, written by Steven H. Long and published by St. Martin’s Press, portrays Knight as the lesbian lover of Harris’ mistress, Gail Bridges. Clara Harris was sentenced to 20 years in prison in the slaying of her husband, whom she ran over after finding him with his mistress at a hotel.

Passages: Ken Hunt, performance artist, poet, activist, and associate publisher of the on-line Blithe House Quarterly, died March 22, 2005, of complications from brain damage. A native of Seattle, Hunt graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism and Spanish. He wrote for the Seattle Times, The New York Times, and the Austin Chronicle, as well as for many community and weekly papers. In Boston he was a reporter and producer for the Allston-Brighton Edition, a progressive public affairs news program. He was most recently based in Chicago teaching English as a second language. Hunt published four books of poetry and, in Chicago, was a featured poet for the Feast of Fools Cabaret and Homolatté. A frequenter of fringe music stages in Chicago, Hunt also performed in the spazz-noise band Unplanned Pregnancy.

The buzz: Riverhead will publish Harm, a new novel by British author Sarah Waters, in March 2006. The novel tells the story of a group of Londoners during and after World War II. Harper will publish John Hall’s Young Adult novel Is He or Isn’t He?, in which two best friends — a gay guy and a straight girl — try to figure out if their crush, a new guy at their Upper East Side private school — is gay or straight. Dutton will publish Lammy-nominee T. Cooper’s second novel Lipshitz Six or Two Angry Blonds, spanning much of the twentieth century by following the Lipshitz family as they escape the Russian Pogroms of 1903 and immigrate to the United States. In the Fall of 2006 Warner will publish I Like You, comedienne Amy Sedaris’s "entertaining guide to entertaining" that includes recipes, complete meal plans, decorating suggestions, music choices, conversational ice-breakers, and hospitality tips. David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and who was publishing director for Random House trade paperbacks and the Modern Library, is becoming an editor-at-large, "a position he requested in order to better accommodate his editorial duties with the demands of his own literary career," according to an announcement from the publisher. He will continue to acquire and edit hardcovers for the publisher, while spending more time on his writing (Random will publish his next novel) and teaching. Among the speakers lined up for BookExpo in June in New York City is Michael Cunningham. Variety reported that John Travolta is a leading contender to slip into Harvey Fierstein’s gowns in the upcoming screen version of the Broadway musical Hairspray. Robin Williams and Toni Collette are set to star in a screen adaptation of Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener, which is set to start shooting in New York in March 2004 under the direction of Patrick Stettner. The book deals with a famous author who begins a telephone friendship with a young fan, only to find himself doubting his new friend’s identity. Maupin wrote the screenplay with Terry Anderson and Stettner.

Kudos: Nominees for the New York Public Library’s 2005 Young Lions Award include Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivioli. The library awards the $10,000 prize each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or short story collection. Last year’s prize went to Monique Truong for The Book of Salt. The shortlist for The BBC Book Club includes David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Finalists for this year’s Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards program include Alison Smith for Name All the Animals in the Nonfiction category. The winner receives a $10,000 prize and a year of additional promotion in B&N stores. Author Wesley Gibson (You Are Here) has joined the teaching staff at Saint Mary’s College of California. The International Gay Film Awards were presented in February 2004 in Los Angeles, honoring the year’s best gay and lesbian films. Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education was named Best Picture, Best Foreign Film, and received the Gay Press Award and Best Actor award for star Gael Garcia Bernal. My Mother Likes Women won for Best Lesbian Film, while Brother to Brother was honored as the Best Indie Film. Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation was voted Best Documentary. In the performers category, presented this year for the first time, Laura Linney won Best Actress In a Leading Role for Kinsey, while Veronica Cartwright was named Best Supporting Actress for Straight Jacket. Peter Sarsgaard won for Best Actor In a Supporting Role in Kinsey.

Fairy Tales Revisited: Hans Christian Andersen, a new biography of Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen, reveals that the writer was gay but may never have acted on his homosexual tendencies. Biographer Jens Andersen states that the writer had infatuations with both men and women but could not bring himself to overcome societal strictures against homosexuality. The biographer also postulates that many of the fairy tales may be read as gay allegories, and some are clearly autobiographical. For instance, "The Little Mermaid" was written after a crisis Andersen suffered in 1836 at the marriage of Edvard Collin, who may have been the love of Andersen’s life but who refused to play the part of his romantic soulmate. Andersen’s novel O.T., depicting an intimate male friendship, is also influenced by this unrequited love, according to the biographer. Although Andersen typically conducted one-sided infatuations with young men, he did experience a more reciprocal romantic friendship with the Hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar, Carl-Alexander von Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whom he met in 1844. In his later years, Andersen was infatuated with the young ballet dancer, Harald Scharff. Born in April 1805, Andersen died in 1875. It was not until 1893 that his sexuality was publicly discussed, when a newspaper hinted that he may have been a homosexual. In 1901, an article in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen also discussed him as a homosexual. An earlier biography of Andersen by Jackie Wullschlager, which documented Andersens’s love for both men and women, caused a scandal when it was published in Denmark, where the sexuality of the national poet is a controversial topic.

Items on the Agenda: In Arkansas, a bill that would have forced schools to use only books that omitted any reference to gay families failed to win the endorsement of the Arkansas Senate Education Committee according to a report by 365Gay.com. The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Roy Ragland, had previously said "the bill was designed to block efforts to promote a gay agenda in schools." The committee cast a 3-3 tie vote and needed at least four votes to move to the Senate floor. It had already passed the House. In Utah, the Nebo School District is not only looking for psychology textbooks which do not advocate homosexuality, but wants to find textbooks which simply don’t mention it at all. State law does not allow the advocacy of homosexuality to be taught and the Nebo district wants no discussion of it at all. In North Carolina, students at the University of North Carolina protested Alabama Rep. Gerald Allen’s (R-Cottondale) bill that would prohibit state funds from purchasing literature that acknowledges homosexuality or written by gay authors. Students and faculty did a 24-hour public reading of works which would be banned if the bill passed. Olivia Henderson, a UNC senior who participated in the event, told a reporter for The Crimson White, the student paper, "This may be Alabama, but Alabama’s not that far from North Carolina." In Canada, the Strong Communities Campaign raised $35,000 to buy books promoting tolerance of different sexual orientations for libraries in the elementary and secondary schools in the Thames Valley District. In the UK, the Haringey Libraries in London have launched a new LGBT book collection to mark the UK’s first ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month. The collection of more than 150 books will be housed at Wood Green Central Library and will be accessible to users of all Haringey Libraries through the library catalogue. All books in the collection are easily identifiable and placed together making it easier for users to browse. In addition to the central collection, Haringey Libraries are introducing LGBT interest magazines at a number of branches. Haringey Libraries have worked closely with local arts organization Wisethoughts and other community groups to ensure that the collection meets the needs of Haringey’s LGBT communities.

For the kids: In March, author and former LBR editor Greg Herren received an e-mail from a reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch telling him that his upcoming speaking engagement with the Gay-Straight Alliance at Manchester High School near Richmond, VA had been canceled. A concerned parents group had decided that Herren was an inappropriate speaker and had circulated an e-mail with the heading "What is being taught in our schools?" "The thing that bothers me the most about this situation is that I was never given an opportunity by the school board or the superintendent to express my opinion, or was even asked what I was planning on talking about," Herren wrote in an e-mail exchange about the event. "As someone who went to high school in an extremely repressive school myself, my heart breaks for the kids at Manchester High, particularly those who have had the courage to be openly gay and join the Gay-Straight Alliance. The message being sent here by their school superintendent, and the ‘concerned parents,’ is clear: gays are bad, gays are evil, and they must be stopped at all costs. How this will effect the students psychologically, I don’t know... but if there are homophobic and gay-bashing students at this school, they’ve just been given a stamp of approval." Undaunted, Herren, 43, and local organizers moved his personal appearance off-campus to the Metropolitan Community Church’s worship space in Richmond. "The trip to Virginia, as it turned out, was probably one of the more educational and inspiring experiences I have had in my life to date," Herren wrote on his blog site (www.livejournal.com/users/scottynola) after more than eighty people attended the event and gave the author a standing ovation. "The lesson I learned from all of this is: we need to do more for queer youth. If you’re a queer writer, keep writing. If you can, find a local GSA and go talk to the kids. If you’re on tour, see if you can find one wherever you are signing, and at least invite the kids to come."

The buzz: Bloomsbury will publish a new novel by David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk, based on true story about a prominent English mathematician and a poor, uneducated Indian clerk who was a math genius. The two-book deal also includes a forthcoming memoir. DaCapo has acquired Allen Ginsberg: The Selected Letters and The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: The Boyhood Journals of Allen Ginsberg, 1938-1951, edited by Bill Morgan, which includes material from the years the poet met Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs; both books are scheduled for publication in Spring 2006. Simon & Schuster will publish Alex Sanchez’s new novel, Getting It, about a straight boy who, with the help of his ostracized gay classmate, figures out that growing up is about much more than getting "it." Author Lawrence Schimel has sold German rights to his collection of short stories, Two Boys, to publisher Mattei Medien. Dick Cheney’s daughter, Mary, is shopping around a book proposal about her days on the campaign trail titled Travels with My Father. New York magazine reported that presidential daughter Patti Davis’s next book will be "a novel about straight women who have a lesbian affair." Here cable channel will launch a series this summer titled Third Man Out, based on the books by Richard Stevenson which center on a gay detective, to be played by Chad Allen. Stephen Fry has joined the cast of the film adaptation of Douglas Adams’s cult novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as the voice of the Guide, the electronic book that guides character Arthur Dent on his galactic travels. Scott Rudin will produce the screen version of Michael Cunningham’s newest novel, Specimen Days. Like The Hours, Specimen Days links three stories with the character of a writer, in this case poet Walt Whitman. Bill Condon, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of Gods and Monsters, will direct the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Dreamgirls. Among the new productions headed for Broadway this year are two Tennessee Williams revivals (The Glass Menagerie starring Jessica Lange and A Streetcar Named Desire starring Natasha Richardson), a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin, a new production of Steel Magnolias with Marsha Mason and Delta Burke, and a new musical titled The Light in the Piazza, based on the novella by Elizabeth Spencer with a score by Adam Guettel and a book by playwright Craig Lucas.

Kudos: The Quills Literary Foundation has formed the Quills Awards, a slate of 19 book awards, most of which will be voted on the general public. Reed Business Information, the parent company of Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Variety, along with 14 local stations owned by NBC Universal Television, are backing the awards. Nominations for the awards will be made beginning in May by a panel of booksellers, librarians, and other publishing professionals. The televised ceremony will air in October. The winners of the 2005 Stonewall Book Awards, awarded by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table (GLBTRT) of the American Library Association (ALA), are The Master by Colm Tóibín (winner of the Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature) and Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and in People by Joan Roughgarden (winner of the Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction). Runners-up in fiction were I Am My Own Wife: A Play by Doug Wright, The Line of Beauty by Allan Hollinghurst , Luna by Julie Anne Peters, and The Seahorse Year by Stacy D’Erasmo. Runners-up in nonfiction were Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality by Patrick Moore, Both: A Portrait in Two Parts by Douglas Crase, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris, and Warrior Poet: a Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis DeVeaux. Among the nominees for the National Book Critics Circle Awards are The Line of Beauty by Allan Hollinghurst (Fiction), The School Among the Ruins by Adrienne Rich (Poetry), Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 by Richard Howard (Criticism), Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century by Graham Robb (Criticism), and Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me by James Wood. (Criticism). Among the recent 2004 GLAAD nominees were screen adaptations of the books A Home at the End of the World (film) and The Blackwater Lightship (TV movie). While GLAAD ignores the GLBT book biz, they do honor both theater and comic books. Among the nominated plays are: Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, Take Me Out, La Cage Aux Folles, and The Normal Heart. Nominated comics are: Ex Machina (Wildstorm/DC Comics), Hard Time (DC Comics), Luba (Fantagraphics Books), My Faith in Frankie (Vertigo/DC Comics), and Strangers in Paradise (Abstract Studio). Trebor Healey’s debut novel, Through it Came Bright Colors, is the winner of the 2004 Violet Quill Award from InsightOut Book Club. In an effort to honor and promote outstanding new lesbian literature, the Publishing Triangle asked fourteen lesbian book reviewers, booksellers, librarians, and/or authors to name the Top 10 most notable lesbian-themed books by lesbian or bisexual authors published in 2004. They are: A Seahorse Year by Stacey D'Erasmo; Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux; Life Mask by Emma Donoghue; Hancock Park by Katherine V. Forrest (Berkeley Publishing); Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver; Luna by Julie Anne Peters (Little, Brown); Name All the Animals: A Memoir by Alison Smith (Scribner); Venus of Chalk by Susan Stinson; Rent Girl by Michelle Tea, illustrated by Laurenn McCubbin; and Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White.

Anti-gay Agenda Continues: Conservative Christian activist groups have issued a gay alert over the appearance of the animated character SpongeBob SquarePants’s inclusion in an all-star cartoon video titled We Are Family. SpongeBob sometimes holds hands with his starfish pal, Patrick. Buster Baxter, the cartoon rabbit star of PBS TV’s Postcards From Buster, has also landed in hot water. He never should’ve gone to Vermont, a state which recognizes same-sex civil unions, where he visited a lesbian couple. In Arkansas, a proposed bill filed by Rep. Roy Ragland (R-Marshall) would force the state’s school districts to purchase only textbooks which define marriage as between one man and one woman. Ragland said the legislation was aimed at bringing school books in line with the state Constitution which bans same-sex marriage.

In the Dark: The historic lighthouse, which inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, could be shut down according to a report in The Scotsman. The newspaper reported that Trinity House, the U.K. lighthouse authority, has proposed putting the lighthouse on Godrevy Island out of service in 2010. The octagonal white tower has been in operation since 1859 and was automated in 1939.

Passages: Architect Philip Johnson died January 25, 2005 at the age of 98 at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut. He was the author and subject of numerous books, including The Architecture of Philip Johnson, Philip Johnson: The Architect in His Own Words, The Houses of Philip Johnson, and Philip Johnson: Life and Work.

Lisa Stocker, the 50-year-old lesbian novelist who wrote P-Town Summer, was struck and killed by a van near her home in Queens, New York, on January 11, 2005. The incident took place just minutes after she stepped off an express bus and the driver, who told investigators he didn't see her amid the freezing rain, was not charged. P-Town Summer, published in 2003, was Stocker's first book, a fictional story about four lesbians set in Provincetown. Stocker is survived by her sister, two nieces, her partner of almost 25 years, JoAnn Ambrosino, and their children, Ann Marie Ambrosino, Michael Ambrosino, and JoAnn Papadopoulos.

Author, poet, critic, and artist Guy Davenport died at the age of 77 on January 4, 2005 in Kentucky. A Distinguished Alumni Professor of English in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, Davenport received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1990. Davenport quit high school in Anderson, S.C., in 1944 to study art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He majored in classics and English and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1948. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he was a member of Merton College, where he wrote the first thesis on James Joyce to be accepted by that university. He received a literature degree in 1950 and returned to the United States. In 1974, Scribner’s published his first collection of short stories titled Tatlin! A second collection of short stories, DaVinci’s Bicycle, was published in 1979. Ecologues appeared in 1981 as well as a collection of 40 essays, Geography of the Imagination. Other publications include: Thasos and Ohio, a volume of poems, in 1986; The Jules Verne Steam Balloon short story collection in 1987; A Table of Green Fields in 1993; The Cardiff Team in 1996; and A Balance of Quinces, an edition of his paintings and drawings. In 1997 he published The Hunter Gracchus, a collection of essays on literature and art, and in 1998 Objects on a Table, an aesthetic meditation on the representation of objects in literature and still-life painting, was published. Davenport’s other awards included a 1992 honorary doctorate from the University of Kentucky, the O. Henry Award for short stories, the 1981 Morton Douwen Zabel award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, translation awards from PEN and the Academy of American Poets, and the Leviton-Blumenthal Prize for poetry. In 1998, he was elected a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass.

The buzz: The winners of the Project QueerLit unpublished first-novelist contest are Supervillianz by Alicia Goranson and Origami Striptease by Peggy Munson. Both of the winning novels will be published by Suspect Thoughts Press. Colm Toibin’s The Master was named one the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Toibin’s novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim made Publishers Weekly’s list of Best Books of 2004. Sedaris was also among the nominees for the 47th annual Grammy Awards, receiving nods for Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim in the Best Spoken Word Album and Live at Carnegie Hall in Best Comedy Album, a category that finds him competing against Ellen DeGeneres’s The Funny Thing Is... Kristin Davis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are in negotiations to star in a film version of Sellevision, Augusten Burrough’s novel about the scandal at a fictional home-shopping channel.

Prelude of Things to Come?: During the 2004 holiday season many NPR stations around the country "censored" the annual re-broadcast of David Sedaris’s popular Santaland Diaries. According to several Internet accounts, the author’s flirtation with "Snowball," another gay male elf at Macy’s, was cut. Also in December 2004, Atlanta police raided the bar where the popular musical revue Naked Boys Singing was performing for permitting adult entertainment without a license. The show had run for four months at The Armory as a benefit for the nonprofit theater Actor’s Express. Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin decided, however, that the raid was based upon the misreading of a section of the Atlanta city code. The musical resumed performances the following week to a sold-out audience. And in Scotland, a group of Christian protesters called on police to prosecute a theater company for blasphemy because it was presenting Terrence McNalley’s Corpus Christi, his play about a gay Jesus.

A Big Bonfire Is Also Being Planned: In December 2004, Alabama state legislator Gerald Allen (R-Cottondale), proposed a bill that would ban all books with gay characters from public libraries. Allen, who had also sought to ban gay marriages, told the press that he had filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda." Allen pre-filed the bill in advance of the 2005 legislative session, which begins February 1, 2005. Allen said that if his bill passed, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. If the bill became law, public school textbooks could not present homosexuality as a genetic trait and public libraries couldn’t offer books with gay or bisexual characters. When asked about Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Allen said that the play probably could not be performed by university theater groups. Allen said that no state funds should be used to pay for materials that foster homosexuality. He said that would include non-fiction books that suggest homosexuality is acceptable and fiction novels with gay characters. While that would ban books such as Heather Has Two Mommies, it could also include classics such as The Color Purple, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Brideshead Revisited.

Off the Shelves But Still On the Web: Creative Visions, the 14-year-old gay and lesbian bookstore in New York City’s Greenwich Village, closed its doors at the end of December 2004. The store occupied the site on Hudson Street of the former A Different Light bookstore. In an e-mail sent to the bookstore’s customer base, Creative Visions owner Vincent Migliore mentioned that many events and changes in the community and the retail sector prompted the store to close, including the death of founder Randy P. Glaser from AIDS, and the continuing loss of its customer base from both the AIDS epidemic and the economic aftermath of 9/11. The rise of bookchains and Internet ordering were also cited as contributing factors. Creative Visions will continue as an online bookseller via their Web site http://www.creativevisionsbooks.com/.

Passages: Joseph Hansen, author of nearly 40 books and one of the first mystery writers noted for creating one of the genre’s first gay protagonists, died November 24, 2004, at his home in Laguna Beach, California, of heart and lung ailments. He was 81. Hansen was born July 19, 1923, in Aberdeen, SD, and was raised in Minneapolis and Altadena, California. He co-founded the gay publication Tangents in 1965, produced the radio program "Homosexuality Today" in Los Angeles in 1969, and helped plan the first gay pride parade in Hollywood in 1970. He was also a founder of the Venice Poetry Workshop and taught fiction workshops at the University of California and Wesleyan University. Hansen wrote poetry and gay-themed fiction under the pseudonym James Colton until he published Fadeout in 1970, which introduced his savvy gay insurance claims investigator/protagonist Dave Brandsetter. It had taken him nearly three years to find a publishing house that would accept an unapologetically gay sleuth without turning the story into a sensationalized account of his homosexuality. It was acquired by Joan Kahn, the celebrated mystery editor at Harper & Row. ''My joke,'' Hansen told The Orange County Register in 1998, ''was to take the true hard-boiled character in American fiction tradition and make him homosexual. He was going to be a nice man, a good man, and he was doing to do his job well.'' Brandsetter appeared in a dozen novels (among them Troublemaker, Death Claims, Obedience, The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning, The Little Dog Laughed, Early Graves, Skinflick, and Gravedigger), the last of which was A Country of Old Men, published in 1991, and which showed Hansen’s weary hero in his late sixties in a post-AIDS world. In the series, Brandsetter also had the same lover for 22 years while his father went through nine marriages. In 1992, Hansen received a life achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America. He is also the author of A Smile in His Lifetime (1981), Job’s Year (1983), and three historical gay-themed "Nathan Reed" novels: Jack of Hearts (1992), Living Upstairs (1993), and The Cutbank Path (which Hansen self-published in 2002). Hansen was married to Jane Bancroft, a teacher and translator, for 51 years until her death in 1994. In 2003, he told Out magazine that his wife was a lesbian and that they had an "agreement" to see other people. The couple had a daughter who later underwent a sex-change operation and is now known as Daniel James Hansen. He is Hansen’s only survivor.

Susan Sontag, novelist, essayist, and critic, died December 28, 2004, in New York City of complications of acute myelogenous leukemia. She was 71. Sontag had been ill with cancer intermittently for 30 years, a struggle that informed one of her most famous books, Illness as Metaphor (1978). Sontag burst onto the literary map with her essay about popular culture, "Notes on Camp," published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Her best-known books, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, include the novels Death Kit (1967), The Volcano Lover (1992), and In America (2000); the essay collections Against Interpretation (1966), Styles of Radical Will (1969), and Under the Sign of Saturn (1982); the critical studies On Photography (1977) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989); and the short-story collection I, Etcetera (1978). Her most recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), was a long essay on the imagery of war and disaster. As an author she received many awards, including the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur grant. Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in Manhattan on January 16, 1933. Her father was a fur trader in China who died when the author was five years old and her mother subsequently moved the family to Tucson, Arizona, where she met and married Capt. Nathan Sontag, a World War II veteran sent there to recuperate. The author took her stepfather's surname. Sontag received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1951 from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, at the age of 17, she met and married the sociologist Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor who would write Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959). The couple subsequently moved to Boston where Sontag earned two master’s degrees from Harvard, the first in English, in 1954, the second in philosophy the following year. She began work on a doctorate in philosophy but did not complete her dissertation. In 1952, Sontag and Rieff became the parents of a son, David Rieff. The couple divorced in 1958. Sontag’s sexuality was a subject she rarely addressed, although in November 2001, Time magazine referred to her and photographer Annie Leibovitz as "companions" when Leibovitz’s daughter was born. Sontag is also survived by her son and a younger sister.

David Brudnoy, the openly gay and nationally broadcast talk radio show host, died December 8, 2004, in Boston, of cancer. He was 64. Brudnoy had also been living with AIDS for nearly a decade. In 1994, Brudnoy revealed that he was gay and had AIDS after he was hospitalized with a viral infection that almost took his life. Brudnoy was best know for his broadcasting career, which started in 1971 at WGBH-TV in Boston. His talk radio career began at WHDH-AM in 1976, then moved to WRKO-AM in 1981, and to WBZ-AM in 1986. Brudnoy was New England’s top-rated talk show host and his call-in radio show touched on almost any topic, including politics, current events, and the arts. In March 2004, Brudnoy’s radio show guests included Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Brudnoy also contributed to many publications, including The New York Times, TV Guide, and The New Republic. His memoir, Life is Not a Rehearsal (1997), chronicled his battle with HIV. Born in Minneapolis, he received a bachelor’s degree in Japanese studies from Yale, a master’s in Far Eastern studies from Harvard, and a master’s in the history of American civilization and a doctorate in history, both from Brandeis University.

Okay. So I am now joining the blogging generation. My intent is not to delve into my deepest and inner most thoughts and moods, nor will this be a bitching post about how hard it is to be writer. No, this is a place to find out what I know is going on in the GLBT publishing world -- basically an outgrowth and expansion of the Publishing Notes column that I contribute every month to Lambda Book Report, published by the Lambda Literary Foundation, on news, trends, sales, awards, and issues facing gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer writers and books. If you want to suggest a news item for me to include and post here, please e-mail me at jimcurrier@aol.com. I'm going to start by "re-broadcasting" my Publishing Notes columns since January 2005. Then, once I'm up to speed, hopefully have something or another to say once or twice a week.