10.01.05 -- 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 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 (www.andyquan.com),
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.
Jameson Currier is the author of the novel, Where
the Rainbow Ends, and a collection of short stories, Desire
Lust Passion Sex. His short fiction can also be found
in the anthologies Men on Men, Best American Gay
Fiction, Best Gay Erotica, Mammoth
Book of Gay Erotica, Making Literature Matter, Rebel
Yell, and Circa 2000, among others. His story “Snow,” published
in the first issue of Velvet
Mafia, was selected for Best
Gay Erotica 2003 and Best
American Erotica 2004.
New Fiction Online: "Alibis" Excerpted
from Desire Lust Passion Sex
Website: JamesonCurrier.com
