Today marks one month until publication date for my novel Army of Lovers. It also marks 10 days before the staged reading of a screenplay, Otto Sabotage, co-written with Aron Kantor, which we’re presenting for the first time to the public. These two events are coincidentally happening within a couple weeks of each other, but they took two winding, overlapping journeys to get here. Today I’m taking a little time to reflect on what it has meant to work away in private, alone or with a co-collaborator, without seeing any results for a long time.
I was remembering one of the most important things anyone ever said to me. I was a grad student in creative writing, having moved to San Francisco after a lifetime on the East Coast, doubting whether I had made the right choice. I’d always written, ever since I was a fifth grader with a diary, but taking myself seriously as a writer by embarking on a degree program was new, and it was daunting. I was working three jobs to put myself through grad school, in addition to taking out loans, and I didn’t know if I had made the right choice, if I was any good, if I had what it took to get where I hoped and dreamed I would wind up. What my friend Jack said to me that day was “persevere.“ That’s been my guidepost through the doubts and challenges that followed. No matter how it’s going, persevere.
Army of Lovers began with sketches I started writing about my time living in New York, when I was involved with ACT UP and was part of the group who created Queer Nation. I was documenting events that were personal and historic at once—events still quite close in the rearview mirror. I wrote so I wouldn’t forget. Other projects took over, and I turned to those instead, but I kept returning to these memories of activism in a time of crisis, even though I had yet to fully understand what they meant to me.
What started to take shape was a novel, not a memoir. Things, people, and places I’d known were transformed by imagination into a story through the tools of fiction—character, plot, language, structure. I worked on it steadily until it was ready to be shopped around to mainstream publishers by an established agent. The publishers all said no, the agent faded from my life, and I was left with a manuscript that I didn’t know how to repair and a dream I couldn’t quite let go off.
Enter Aron Kantor, a filmmaker and my friend, asking me to collaborate with him on a screenplay and kicking off a partnership of creativity that has birthed three feature-length scripts and a TV pilot. After a lot of alone time, working as a team was energizing. Aron is a wonderful partner: enthusiastic, open, visionary, and seriously funny. We each have strengths that bolster what the other one needs. We wrote through the isolation of the pandemic, and we’ve been working ever since, through lots of rejection, to find each of these projects a home. Right now Aron is working his tail off to produce Otto Sabotage—a comedic 24-hour odyssey set in San Francisco’s queer nightlife—as an independent feature that he will direct.
At some point, in the midst of all this screenwriting, along came Michael Nava, editor at Amble Press. Michael invited me to show him my ACT UP novel, which I had completely rewritten. I was elated to find that Michael understood the story I was telling and the way I was telling it, and he guided me through a round of revision that became a finished draft. Amble will publish Army of Lovers on October 11.
If you have read this far, thank you. I appreciate that you’re curious about where I’m at right now and what it took to get here. Please support the work! Here’s how:
Come to the staged reading of Otto Sabotage and learn more about what we need to turn it into a film. It’s free, but you can make a reservation. September 21, 7 PM, at SF Oasis in San Francisco.
Pre-order Army of Lovers, either directly at your favorite local bookstore; through the indie bookstore portal bookshop.org; or anywhere you order books online.
After years of hearing No, amid much self-doubt, and through periods of true despair, it seems surreal that suddenly there will be a book, and a presentation of the screenplay, to share with the world. I’m excited! And of course I’m a little scared, because every time you put yourself out to the world you open yourself up to all kinds of things. There’s a lot of vulnerability inside all this excitement. That’s part of persevering as well. Persevering through the vulnerability.
That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing that work with you really soon. Love, Karl.