K.M. Soehnlein

Seeing Results: Otto Sabotage and Army of Lovers

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.

Eleven Writers, One Story Cycle

Introducing Temporary Shelter: a collection of interwoven stories that I edited and wrote with ten writers in my seminar at the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing Program. 

Buy the book on Lulu.com. If you're in San Francisco, come hear us read on Saturday Dec. 10, from 7-9pm, at Epicenter Cafe.

Below is my introduction to the book, about the process of collectively writing our "story cycle": eleven writers each writing one story set in contemporary San Francisco, with characters and events appearing in multiple stories that crisscross and overlap in all kinds of surprising ways.

--

Introduction: In Need of Rescue

“…what seemed essential to San Francisco was the fog. The sense of this place where a curtain of fog is pulled over and pulled away and then pulled over...it brings with it a feeling that something different is happening. …It's a city where extreme inquiry has always had a place.”—Jennifer Egan 

Tough times lead to tough stories. In 2011, as the writers of this collecton were hard at work, tales of turmoil reached us daily: around the world, protests in the street; in the headlines, further economic collapse. Little earthquakes shook the Bay Area all fall, the planet itself in a state of adjustment.

One night in November, trouble literally arrived at our door. In the middle of class at the University of San Francisco, we heard a bang, then a louder bang and then breaking glass. There on Fulton Street, in full view, a car was upside down, roof on the asphalt, carriage exposed, shattered glass everywhere. A reckless driver had hit a parked car, and the impact flipped his vehicle over. As we went outside to witness, firemen and paramedics arrived on the scene. A man staggered from the wreckage, spitting blood but belligerently refusing the help of responders. That he was intoxicated became clear; whatever else was going on with him, we could only guess.

Life imitates art. This accident came at the exact moment we were discussing our story cycle, the book now in your hands—a collection filled with car crashes and firemen, belligerent drunks and blood on the street. I’m sure I was not the only writer in our group who entertained the magical thought that we had willed this driver and his rescuers to our door—the real San Francisco endorsing our fictional version.

When we, the eleven writers included in Temporary Shelter, began to imagine this project, we found that many of us were drawn to tales of rescue. There were physical rescues—all those firemen, and also children pulled from harm, and drifters dragged in from the cold. There were those in need of emotional rescue—an accident victim in a state of post-traumatic stress, an awkward blind date attempting right itself, an elderly woman recuperating her dignity with an uncharacteristic act of boldness. And there were figures perhaps beyond rescue: a marriage marred by secrets, young men punched bloody, a bird with a broken wing.

Our goal was to create a story cycle, whose pieces could stand alone but were interconnected to suggest a greater whole. Story cycles are usually written by a single author, like Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, which charts the Haitian diaspora through disparate lives linked by one family’s brutal past, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its circle of characters linked to San Francisco’s punk-rock music scene in the late 1970s. We read both of these books, and more, and along the way we created one of our own.

Each story began as an idea—or image, character or event—set in contemporary San Francisco. Each went through multiple drafts, with much sharing of pages and many group discussions aimed at making our stories cohere. Some connections were planned from the start: a startling event in a bar told through the mind of its instigator in one story, appears in another from the point of view of a witness; the couple managing an apartment building near the Panhandle show up in the background of two other stories about the other people living there. Further connections came with revision: a narrator speeding down the freeway notes in passing a roadside accident, featured elsewhere as a central event; the lonely boy who plays his trumpet for money around San Francisco has an encounter with a lonely girl being ignored by her father in Golden Gate Park. What was remarkable to me, the collection’s nominal editor, was how our separate imaginations were drawn to the same themes. As the world shook around us, we seemed most drawn to trouble, to those causing it or those upended by it—characters in need of rescue and shelter.

Our story cycle seems to be asking, Who are we, in the midst of all this trouble, and what do we do about it? Jennifer Egan’s notion of “extreme inquiry” seems right for these tough times, and the authors of the stories in this collection are up to the task. Their renderings of characters in crisis suggest the varieties of action, denial and escape that we embrace when we have no choice but to consider making change. Like all serious fiction, these stories offer points of identification and entry instead of easy answers.

Meanwhile, the fog rolls over San Francisco, and the fog rolls out again, reminding us each time that in the end, all shelter is temporary.

 —K.M. Soehnlein, December 2011

 

 

The Safeway

A video has been posted of a reading I did on Sept. 11, as part of an event called Buffet Flats, a salon that mixes queer performance with the San Francisco local food & urban farming movements. The salon was held in the "Tenderloin National Forest," a magical garden and gallery space built up from a formerly scary, dead-end alley in the midst of the 'hood.

I wrote a piece called "The Safeway" especially for this night -- it's a mostly-true memoir of going to Safeway on 9/11, in a post-attack panic about the end of the world.

Shout-outs to Seth Eisen of Buffet Flats (that's him in the finery, introducing me), Mark McBeth for taping and posting the link, and my pal John Vlahides, to whom the story is dedicated.

 

Jane Smiley, An Appreciation

I delivered these remarks to introduce the writer Jane Smiley at the Lone Mountain Reading Series, held at the University of San Francisco on March 2, 2011. I'm printing them here by request.

All writers need models, not just the ones we admire from history but the ones who walk among us, living the writing-life we aspire to. Tonight I’m very happy to be able to say a few words about a writer who has been such a model for me.

I first encountered Jane Smiley’s fiction as perhaps many of us did, with her breakout 1992 novel A Thousand Acres. I was at that time getting serious about writing, and I went to see Ms. Smiley read at Three Lives Bookstore in the West Village of Manhattan. Three Lives is one of those small wood-paneled stores with indirect lighting that smell like chamomile tea. It was crowded, I sat on the floor, and I listened as she read a series of passages describing the Iowa prairie, the thousand-acres upon which the story took place. She evoked the novel not with a chunk of the plot but with a string of images, opening my eyes to the symbiosis between landscape and story—an early lesson for me in how a place could operate like a character in fiction, alive with active verbs and insistent adjectives. Alive with language.

Language for Smiley is insistently precise, peppered with humor, always demanding your attention. No matter where or what she writes about, I find myself caring an awful lot.

If you only know A Thousand Acres, you’ve got some catching up to do. She’s written a dozen books since then. You need to read her novella, The Age of Grief, in which the marriage between a husband and wife, both dentists, falls apart over the course of six weeks and the husband, our narrator, only 35 years old, tells us:

"It seems to me I have arrived at the age of grief…[when]…the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—all that schooling, all that care…[and] we think, if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it?"

You need to read Moo, the very funny campus satire which observes of a fictional university:

"The collection of stone buildings had evolved into a web of offices where secretaries sat under bright lights, and near them, much more dimly, sat administrators whose grasp on things was tenuous at best. The secretaries were connected by computer. The only people who talked on the phone anymore were the administrators, whose whole lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nit-picking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance."

And you definitely need to read Horse Heaven, which is what Tolstoy might have written if he’d had a sense of humor and a passion for Thoroughbreds. This novel is expansive and humane and full of insight into the relationship-dynamics up and down the rungs of professional horse racing, which turns out to be an economic and social system so intricate and storied it might as well be the Russian aristocracy. You could call Horse Heaven the Great American Racetrack Novel. Or you could just call it great.

Many of you have read—if you've taken a class with me—13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. It’s a historical survey, an examination of the craft of novel writing and also a kind of moral boost for writers—not so much a how-to as a why-you-must. In it she offers a brief memoir of her attempt, in the wake of 9/11, to overcome writers block by sitting down to read 100 novels in a year.

(I only managed to read 55 books last year, and I was really, really trying.)

But that’s part of what has made Jane Smiley a model to me. She seems to push her intellectual inquiry further, and her curiosity deeper, than so many of contemporary writers bother to go.

I was reminded again of this when she appeared last week on Oprah talking about A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Smiley wrote a biography of Charles Dickens—among everything else—and she talked about Dickens as a writer of “extreme states of mind.” She compared Madame Defarge to an abused child—oppressed not necessarily by her family but by a corrupt culture—something that you could see opened up the book all over again for the Oprah audience.

One senses that Jane Smiley cares about her audience, which is certainly related to what makes her such an inspiration. I’m very pleased to be in the audience tonight, to hear her read and answer our questions.

After this Smiley read from her latest novel, Private Life, and then took questions from the audience.

 

Literary Death Match and other balancing acts

That thing on my head is a crown, not a dunce cap, though I do feel a bit duncey today after publicly displaying my complete lack of knowledge of pi... But I'm getting ahead of myself. The crown was what I got, along with the medal around my neck -- which, if you could see it, would show a fist-bump comin' at ya -- for winning Literary Death Match. The event at the Elbo Room was packed; I wasn't really sure who was in the crowd because I was pretty much blinded by the spotlights. (Seriously, how do performers ever get used to that?)

I read a heavily-edited-for-time version of "Harmony Moore Has To Die," one of the autobiographical stories I've been writing over the past few years about the years I spent in New York in the late 80s-early 90s and was involved in ACT UP. I was right out of college, and I thrust myself into the world of social-change-through-civil-disobedience in a big way, and so went from being a barely out of the closet student to a more or less full time queer activist. "Harmony Moore" is about a character named Eliot, a fictional composite of two different friends, both of them now dead: Luis Salazar, a very sweet boy who I spent a night in jail with in Albany, New York, after we were arrested at a "die-in" outside the state legislature, and Bradley Ball, a larger than life figure who once threw a birthday party at which he invited all his friends to bring a cake, and then, over the course of the night, threw every last cake out the window of his midtown Manhattan apartment. In the story, Eliot comes out in drag as Harmony, wearing "a platinum wig that had seen better days," and for the hell of it, I pulled from my pocket a wig of that description and wore it for part of the reading. It helps to have a husband who's both peformed in drag and directed theater if you're going to try that outside of your home.

The crowd, and the judges -- Josh Kornbluth, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb and Ayelet Waldman -- all responded strongly to what I wrote, but in a very hilarious Death Match style, which meant jokes about prison sex, points deducted for cliches ("sunken cheeks" was kind of lame, I admit) and observations about how the spotlight shining through my ears turned them a distracting transparent pink. Public comments about the way my ears stick out...jeesh, it's like I was back in middle school...but that's the nature of Literary Death Match, a fine balance between public glory and public humiliation. They picked me as the winner of my round over a very droll Jim Nelson, who read a funny, sexually explicit and somewhat cringe-inducing story about an awkward threeway in a hotel room.

For the finale, I was up against Katharine Noel, who, along with her husband, Eric Puchner, won the second round with their completely charming essay about being writers in a relationship; Eric's text was frequently intercut with Katharine's "footnotes," as she was quick to correct his version of things, usually declaring them "total exaggerations." They also ran down a "scorecard" that tallied which of them had more Amazon reader reviews, translations, prizes and so forth. (This seemed to horrify Ayelet Waldman, whose husband is the super- successful Michael Chabon, and who for her own peace of mind is clearly not keeping that kind of scorecard.) Eric and Katherine had been selected over Michelle Richmond, who read a really enjoyable piece called "Turndown Service" written from the point of view of her husband, Kevin, a man no one in the literary community is sure even exists, because he never shows up at any of her readings. Michelle, you've only deepened the mystery!

Our lovely and sadistic hosts Todd Zuniga and Alana Conner forced Katherine and I to step into garbage bags, then hop across the stage and write on a posterboard "ten different digits that are part of mathematical pi" (a trick, since there are of course only ten digits, right? But I still got totally flustered and wrote somethign that began with 2.14....Oy!). Then each of us had to balance a copy of David Foster Wallace's big, fat novel Infinite Jest on our heads, and walk back and forth across the stage. I hit the finish line first without dropping the book -- all those years of practicing my supermodel posture paid off -- though I'm told that Katherine, who was in the lead up until then, had waited for me before she started the final leg, so maybe I only won by a gift? Oh, well, what's winning anyway, when you look so darn ridiculous in your paper crown?

By far the best boost of the night for me was the praise I got for my story, which has given me the push I needed to get back into this material. With "Robin and Ruby" already in production, I've been feeling around for my next big writing project. I'm pretty sure that these ACT UP stories are what I need to be writing. Over a post-Match dinner at Corner, Kevin went out of his way to convince me that it's time to finally commit to this. I've been reluctant, I think, because that time was so important to me, and important to history, too -- ACT UP was instrumental in changing the way AIDS drugs were tested, and the way AIDS was talked about in the media and viewed by the government. How to translate something so big into what is essentially a rather modest form, a series of short stories, linked together by the point of view of one unformed young man? Talk about a balancing act.

UPDATED: Changed the original pic to this one, taken on the street outside.

Read to the Death

I haven't been this excited (or terrified) about a reading for a long, long time (probably since I had to read an Armistead Maupin story at an Armistead Maupin tribute, with Armistead himself in the house). I'm talking about Friday night's Literary Death Match, sponsored by Opium Magazine, at which I'll be one of four writers competing (or five, since two are teamed up together, which seems like an unfair advantage). It works like this: two writers read and are judged by a panel seated on stage, usually with drinks in their hands. Then two more read, and then the winners of each round compete in a "death match" that has nothing to do with writing -- stuff like laser tag, shooting hoops with Nerf balls, or a staring contest. (If I make it to the final round on Friday, please, please, please no sports-like activities. A staring contest, now that I can handle. Bring it on.)

The LDM phenomenon has been one of the best things to happen to the writing world in a long time -- the competitive aspect is pretty good-natured and mostly provides an entertaining frame around the well-written fiction that gets read. The couple times I've been to LDM the crowds were big, much larger than most of the bookstore readings I've been to, but usually as respectful. I say "usually" because there was the time a very drunk heckler stood up and tried to shut down Wesley Stace, shouting "No, you're doing it wrong!" Of course, if you can handle your heckler in style, you'll likely score some points with the judges.

LDMs have been held in New York, Boston, Chicago, and as far away as Beijing. I hear there's one planned for Rio de Janeiro. Hats off to globe-trotting organizer Todd Zuniga, who'll be c0-hosting Friday in San Francisco:

Literary Death Match
When: Friday, June 12; Doors at 6:30, show at 7:15 p.m. (sharp)
Where: Elbo Room, SF
647 Valencia St., (415) 552-7788
Cost: $10 (and an issue of Opium8--$2 off the cover price!)
With: K.M. Soehnlein, Jim Nelson, Michelle Richmond and Eric Puchner / Katharine Noel

Library Laureates

Last night at the San Francisco Main Library I was thrilled to be honored as a Library Laureate, one of 35 writers selected as part of an annual tribute to the local literary community -- and as a way to fundraise for the Friends of the Library. It was quite a schmancy night -- the wine flowed, the catered hors d'œuvres kept coming and folks were dressed to kill. The theme of the night was Evolution -- in honor of the Darwin bicentenary. A handful of men wore Darwin garb -- bowlers and beards -- and there were women dressed with feathery references to various exotic and endangered species. (Someone dressed as Annie Oakley and someone else as Indiana Jones, and though I didn't really get the evolutionary connection there, I do love a costume.)

After a group photo -- how do you corral thirty five adults onto a stage for a posed pic? very slowly -- and a wine reception, they sent everyone off to different wings of the library to eat dinner at tables for ten, with five tables in a room. I don't travel in the major-donor circle a whole lot, so I didn't know what to expect, but Kevin and I were at a lively table, which included another writer, an literary agent and a number of library volunteers. The two women I sat between were great conversationalists. (I learned a lot about Andrew Carnegie's role in creating free public libraries. "He wasn't very good to his workers," I was told, "but he was good to the public.")

The "laureates" had been asked to prepare five-minutes worth of remarks to deliver during the (very pretty) dessert course; our subject was to be evolution, or our own work, or libraries in general, and as is often the case with a rather loose assignment, some folks were quite prepared and held the room's attention, others didn't and rambled. The highlight for me was author and critic Jonathon Keats's commentary about how evolution has actually been a somewhat "stupid" process; he cited such evidence as the fallible human eye and our awkward spinal column, which doesn't make it very easy for folks to sleep at night.

For my remarks, I had put out a call via email and Facebook asking for "what the library means to you." Within a few hours I was flooded with replies -- everyone, it seems, had specific memories to share. I pieced them together and added my own; I even dug out my 1974 summer reading card, issued by the Westwood Public Library. Here's what I said:

In preparation for tonight, I polled a few family members and friends for their memories of the library as a way to stimulate my own memories.

I got some wonderful responses – my editor at Kensington Books, John Scognamiglio, wrote: "The library is where I first fell in love with books and why I have a career in publishing. My mom took me there when I was either four or five and we checked out HARRY THE DIRTY DOG and I was hooked …"

A couple of my friends who are now mothers bemoaned the fact that their children find everything online now, because they’re missing out on the more sensory aspects of the physical building. One wrote: "I was in love with it — the smell, the quiet, the shiny gloss of the card catalog. I really don't think kids get that love any more with electronic searches."

In fact the sensory, or even sensual aspect of the library was commented on by a few. One female friend wrote:
"The library meant a place where I could read what I want, uncensored, while still being able to make out with my high school boyfriend in the stacks… Libraries = rite of passage coupled with freedom of speech. Not easily re-created online..."
 
A male friend expressed how the library was the site of a recurring fantasy of coming upon one particular high school hunk – a lifeguard at the local swim club – in the stacks where a particular book with homosexual content could be found.

And of course like many young, closeted kids, for me the library was a place where I could learn about things that back then weren’t discussed in the government or the media, much less classroom.

But even before the library became associated with the sensual and illicit, the library was really important to me as a kid – our town library in Westwood, New Jersey was only three blocks from my house, and there was a large and active children’s room. The two librarians were sort of like good cop and bad cop – Mrs. B who always smiled and hugged you, and Miss T. who was more likely to shush you.

My sister Kim remembered that she was working at the library at one point, shelving books, and she heard Miss T’s “horrified voice saying…. 'Oh no!  Not the card catalogue!' and I knew she was talking about the movie, The Breakfast Club, which had just come out.  Perhaps you remember the scene where Judd Nelson is pulling index cards of out the drawer and stuffing them back in randomly.”

The library had a summer reading program. You’d read a book, then go in and report back on it to Mrs. B., and she’d mark it down on your card and at the end of the summer you’d get a certificate. I actually have my summer reading card from 1974, when I was in 4th grade and read 15 books. Here's what I read:

1. Encyclopedia Brown & the Case of the Secret Pitch
2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
3. Paul Revere
4. Crazy Horse
5. Encyclopedia Brown Solves the [something?]
6. John F. Kennedy
7. Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man
8. Nathan Hale
9. Encyclopedia Brown Keeps the [something?]
10. Encyclopedia Brown Shows the Way
11. Encyclopedia Brown Tracks Them Down
12. Johnny Appleseed
13. If You Sailed on the Mayflower
14. Farmer Boy
15. Abraham Lincoln

Apparently I was into mysteries and history. I don’t read as many mysteries as I used to, or as many biographies. But I still keep track of the books I read every year. There’s no librarian to report back to, no hug from Mrs. B, but that’s OK. Reading has become its own reward.

After I spoke, a woman at my table told me that the summer reading program still goes on at her local branch library in Noe Valley, in much the same way it did in Westwood. I was also told that the services the library provides are, since the economy tanked last year, in greater demand than ever. The good news from last night is that the Laureates dinner is going to help meet that demand: $250,000 was raised. That's a lot of Friends for the library.

What the 80s mean now

I suppose it was inevitable that the Passing on the Pen reading at the GLBT Historical Society would turn away from questions of gay fiction and toward those of history. Both Trebor and I read from stories set in those years I think of as the AIDSies -- late eighties/early nineties, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Just saying "AIDS epidemic" positions me as someone who came of age at a time when the spread of HIV was exponential, unstoppable, and talk of "long term survival" was mostly wishful thinking.  ... We are each more than simply a member of a generation, but none of us can escape being shaped by historical forces, it seems.

Aug. 12 Reading with Trebor Healey

You're Invited: On Tue. Aug. 12, I'll be reading an excerpt from my new novel -- which for lack of a better word is a sequel to "The World of Normal Boys." It doesn't have a title yet. I'm calling it "Robin and Ruby" because it's told through the voices of both Robin MacKenzie and his younger sister, during one intense weekend during the summer of 1985. Most of the book takes place down the Jersey shore. [And for those of you not from New Jersey, it's always "down" the shore, not "on" the shore or "at" the shore. Just sayin'...]

I'm reading with Trebor Healey -- check out his novel "Through It Came Bright Colors" and his collection "Perfect Scar and Other Stories." ... When Trebor and I were signed up for this event, we decided to start exchanging emails about a bunch of different topics, like what it means to write "gay fiction" and which authors have been influential to us. But our correspondence quickly became mostly about sex. We'll probably read from some of our letters to each other -- maybe the sex part, maybe the less jizzy stuff.

The reading is part of a series sponsored by the GLBT Historical Society and the Lambda Literary Foundation. The series is called "Passing on the Pen" and looks at queer writers of different generations (though Trebor and I are more or less the same age, and we both agree that we're still a little young -- relatively speaking -- to be slotted into something "historical").

DETAILS: Tue. Aug. 12 - Passing on the Pen, with authors K.M. Soehnlein and Trebor Healey. At the GLBT Historical Society, 657 Mission Street #300, Tuesday, August 12, 6:30-8:30 p.m.   Preceded by a special archives tour at 6:15.