K.M. Soehnlein

Happy Lammy-versary to Me

With the great Michelle Tea

20 years ago today! This is me and Michelle Tea on May 31, 2001, beaming with joy after each of us won Lambda Literary Awards – hers for the inimitable, influential, already-a-classic Valencia (Mission San Francisco at its peak queer ’90s explosion) and mine for The World of Normal Boys, my first novel.

What I remember about that night: my heroic, generous editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books, paid for my rented tux; Michelle told a hilarious story about the uptight flight attendant who didn’t want to let her on the airplane to Chicago because she was wearing her “underwear” (“Yes, it’s a slip, but it’s also my dress!”); we sat at the same table as the lovely Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja, also San Francisco-based writers, who won an award that night, too, which made us the winningest, happiest crew in the room.

With my editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books

I also remember being so flat-broke before I flew from SF to Chicago that I was literally turning over couch cushions in my apartment to scavenge coins for extra pocket money. By the end of the night Kevin (then-boyfriend-now-husband) and were I jumping for joy on the bed in my hotel room, not because the award came with any money but because it had been such a long hard road to publishing. Something like 33 publishers rejected The World of Normal Boys before Kensington said yes, and it’s gone on to be the most-read of my books, in its 10th printing, translated into three languages, still coughing out modest but much appreciated royalties and inspiring a sequel (Robin and Ruby), with another one drafted, currently titled Dorothy’s Children. (Publishing goddesses willing, it won't take 33 rejections to get this one into the hands of readers.)

ALSO: This 20-year anniversary is a prime time to announce that I’ve just signed a contract for a novel, Army of Lovers, that I’ve been writing for a long, long time. This is my ACT UP/Queer Nation novel set in the late-’80s / early-’90s in New York. It's a work of fiction but also really personal, about a time in my life when my mother died, when so many comrades fought to stay alive, when a wave of gay-bashing hit my friends and me. And it's a story about falling in love, finding a voice, and speaking truth to power within a political community doing direct action to change the world.

I’m thrilled that Amble Press, a new LGBTQ publishing imprint headed by the brilliant writer and editor Michael Nava, has acquired this novel. (Michael's new novel is called Lies With Man.) The ink on my contract is barely dry, so I don’t yet have a publication date or any juicy details. But you can be sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

So Happy Lammy-versary to Michelle, Krandall, Paul, and me. And good luck to all the nominees for this year’s Lambda Awards, held on June 1, and hosted by the charming and talented Rakesh Satyal.

Why don’tcha go out and get yourself a queer book today?  

Kevin Killian, essential writer

Kevin Killian has died, a tragically sad and unbelievable piece of news, an irrevocable loss for those who loved him and a stunning gut punch for those of us who knew him from the world of writing, where he was a kind of foundation upon which many other things stood—books, poems, plays, anthologies, classes and lectures and social happenings. If you knew Kevin you knew he was talented, original, generous, well-liked, gossipy, and he popped up everywhere. And if you don’t know who he is that’s a sad testament to the way a writer with a three-decade body of work and a crucial role in the queer San Francisco literary scene (and beyond) can still be somehow marginal rather than essential, which is what he was.

When I first started timidly telling people in my early 20s that I wanted to pursue a life of writing, a slightly older but far more artistically pedigreed friend said to me, “Well, if you’re going to be a gay writer you have to read Kevin Killian, you have to read ‘Shy.’” I went to St. Mark’s Bookstore in the East Village, when it was still on St. Mark’s Place, and found a copy, back when books by or about gay men always had a shirtless torso on the cover, which damned a whole generation of gay male writers to the tyranny of low expectations. But “Shy” was more interesting and cooler than anything I’d ever read before.

I loved the way the narrator was named Kevin Killian, same as the author, and that in Chapter 1 he was at his typewriter in his rented apartment when the other characters entered his life, as if he was writing them into existence. Which he was, since this was a novel, but it also seemed true, like a memoir. I didn’t know then that Kevin was a pillar of a movement dubbed New Narrative that made literary tricks such as this the point of literature, but instead of feeling tricked I felt awake to new possibility. I loved that his teenage characters had absorbed David Bowie’s lyrics to the point that they saw the world through the wisdom they found there, which was foolish and fabulous at the same time. I loved the unmistakably homo point of view, where “Kevin” could write of a character: “I thought he was kind of boring. Right at first sight. You could tell he was straight: he fairly vibrated with nasty heterosexual strings.” I absorbed with astonishment that this was a novel that wasn’t asking anyone for permission to be what it was going to be.

I was an MFA student at San Francisco State when I first met Kevin. I wound up after a reading at a table full of people where I had no business being and everyone seemed knowing and fabulous and gossipy in a way that must have been charming but mostly just intimidated me. Then years later we met again and maybe because I was older or maybe because he was, he was very easy to talk to. After that he always greeted me with a friendliness that seemed steeped in admiration. We once talked in the aisle of Trader Joe’s for 20 minutes about five hundred different things. He was irresistible. 

Later still he was writing review after review on Amazon that were little works of literature themselves, a kind of performative review cycle, and I said something like “I don’t dare ask you to review my novel,” but he smiled and said he would. His review of “You Can Say You Knew Me When” had the subject line title, “You Asked for It,” a message from him to me. In it, he said some of the most amazing things that have ever been said about my writing, like, “Soehnlein's details are like pinpricks of starlight in the black velvet vistorama of his novel.” Yes, I’m bragging, but, I mean, velvet vistorama! Thank you, Kevin, forever, for that. Worth noting: he also took the time to call out, delightfully, the fact that I incorrectly referenced when Ingrid Bergman was in Italy having her affair with Robert Rossellini; by the date I cited, the affair was “cold as ashes,” Kevin noted in a perfect aside.

Kevin was high and low in one, writing about Dario Argento, Kylie Minogue, Jack Spicer and the Black Mountain School. He was nice to everyone, knew everyone, told stories about everyone, collaborated with everyone—that is all the everyones who populate a literary underground, where you can make your life if not your living from art. He died at 66, which is grievous, stupid, and horrible, leaving behind his wife, the brilliant writer Dodie Bellamy, and countless friends, collaborators, former students, readers, admirers, and people he schooled on Ingrid Bergman. “Shy” seems to be out of print, which someone needs to correct immediately, but in the decades since he wrote dozens more, including his last, the brilliant “Fascination,” which came out in 2018. Go find one of his books and read it.

To Be Gay With You

This week’s gruesome and brutal murder of a gay 19-year-old in Puerto Rico, George Jorge Mercado (pictured), is the latest horrifying reminder that violence against LGBT people is on the rise worldwide. Is there any consensus on why this is happening? Conventional wisdom says that the growth of the international queer movement, pushing visibility and civil rights, has intensified the backlash, but the sheer dehumanizing ugliness of the attack in Puerto Rico—which makes Matthew Shepard’s murder 11 years ago seem nearly tame in comparison—makes me wonder, do we really even understand homophobic violence?

This question had been on my mind since last week, when I saw a San Francisco performance by the British group DV8 called To Be Straight With You. DV8 combined its hallmark physical theater with audio culled from man-on-the-street interviews spouting blatant homophobia, and more personal testimony from people who had been victimized by anti-gay violence. Some of the victims were refugees from countries like Iraq, Zimbabwe and Jamaica, where anti-gay hostility is so culturally accepted that queer people are often forced to seek asylum in places like the U.S. and Britain, which offer some degree of legal protection.

The vocal collage in To Be Straight With You created for me a sense that anti-LGBT violence is a global crisis, something akin to “ethnic cleansing.” (Indeed, in Jamaica, where homophobic culture flourishes through the hatred inspired by murder music from singers like Buju Banton, one community recently declared a Gay Eradication Day, demanding that gays and lesbians leave the town or "suffer the consequences.") Is there any other population in the world today who can be put to death in 7 countries, as LGBT people can in Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen and parts of Nigeria and Somalia? That these seven countries are all Islamic and bound to Sharia law explains why DV8 put a particular, though not exclusive, focus on homophobia among Britain’s large Muslim population. The question of how organized religions promulgate this global crisis was the underlying thesis of the entire piece.

Religions are kept alive within the structure of the nuclear family. What DV8’s stage piece drove home was how the nuclear family is more often than not the conduit for organized religion to transmit homophobia. The strongest moment of To Be Straight With You featured one dancer jump-roping nonstop (above) while voicing the reminiscence of a Muslim queer boy in England who, after coming out, was chased down and stabbed by his father, with the help of his older brother. The boy survived, retaining enough sassiness and strength to find his way to gay pride parade at age 14.

Familial homophobia is the subject of writer Sarah Schulman's new book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which Doug Ireland in Gay City News has dubbed "one of the most exciting gay liberation texts to appear in years." The same night I was watching DV8 in San Francisco, Schulman (pictured) was delivering the prestigious Kessler Lecture in New York City. Among Schulman's assertions is that homophobia—long understood to originate from the fear of one’s own innate or latent attraction to one’s gender—is not a phobia at all, but a "pleasure center." She writes:

"...homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of superiority. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It’s not fear—it’s fun."

I think Schulman's on to something, but I think there's more going on. The attack in Puerto Rico, the Shiite death squads who patrol Baghdad for queers to torture and kill, and the exhortations to violence by Jamaican dancehall singers are all based on something that seems deeper than “enacting superiority.” The leap to violence might best be understood by research done at the University of Arkansas in 2002. Psychologists noted that anti-gay feeling is often less a matter of  fear than of disgust. Homophobes have been trained to see gay people as dirty and contagious—something diseased than can spread. Arkansas researcher Jeffrey Lohr notes,

"While fear causes a 'get me away from that' reaction, disgust manifests as 'get that away from me.' These different emotional reactions can lead to very different behaviors, according to Lohr. 'The same emotions that mediate attitude can mediate behavior,' he said. 'If fear mediates avoidance, other emotions may mediate attack.'"

The oft-quoted Bible verse used to support violence against gays, from Leviticus, refers to man-lying-with-man as an "abomination," with its connotation of disgust and loathing, and says, “blood shall be upon them.” Does anyone need any clearer example of how a religion can propagate anti-gay violence—comparing the way some people naturally love with a disease that needs to be wiped out? In DV8’s piece, a young woman from South London claims not to be prejudiced but says of gay sex, “It’s nasty." Disgust like hers is the end result of ancient tribal dogma turned into scripture by organized religion, propagated within family structures and unquestioned at the street-level by poorly educated youth.

Can art adequately address this kind of entrenched disgust? One of the feelings I was left with, amid many, after watching the DV8 show, was that it had created an argument for the importance of tough penalties for hate-based violence. The good news is that after years of trying to enact federal hate crimes laws, our Democrat-controlled Congress finally succeeded. Last month, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Just as significantly, Obama signed legislation that finally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers entering the U.S., a law that had been on the books for 22 years. For all the shortcomings of the Obama's actions on gay civil rights, these two laws strike me as an especially important tandem victory, as strong a stance as any world leader has taken to ensure not just that gay people are protected under the law but that this country actually can serve as a kind of safe haven for those who have nowhere else to go.

After signing the Hate Crimes Act—which, it's worth noting, also includes religious belief as a protected class—Obama spoke from the podium [video], saying,

"You understand, that we must stand against crimes that are meant not only to break bones but to break spirits. Not only to inflict harm but to instill fear...No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love."

I was particularly moved by his inclusion of that final phrase. Perhaps the best way to confront the global crisis of hate that we are facing is to remember we are fighting for our right to express our love.

The Angry Writer

Something is going on right now with writers. Writers are getting angry. Angry about bad reviews. More to the point: writers are venting their anger against their critics in a public way. In the past week, a writer I know used her Twitter account to vent (her word) against a New Yorker reviewer by posting "may she rot in hell"—and two relatively high-profile incidents of writers mouthing off about their reviewers have rippled out across the inter-twitter-web. "Mouthing off" isn't quite right; these writers see themselves as striking back. Writer-versus-reviewer is not particularly novel. But what seems notable to me about these latest incidents is that writers are simply fed up with people talking smack about them. Writers understand the consequences of a bad review; frankly, it's pissing folks off, and they're using technology to respond in self-defense.

Incident number one: Alice Hoffman. The New York Times reported last week on Hoffman's "Twitter outburst" over a Boston Globe review of her novel The Story Sisters:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

By Monday, Ms. Hoffman had evidently deleted her Twitter account. “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion,” Ms. Hoffman said in a statement forwarded by her publisher...

Incident number two: Alain de Botton. After critic Caleb Crain pointed readers of his blog to a review he wrote of de Botton's Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, a review that accused de Botton, among other things, of "mean-spiritedness," the reviewed author found a forum for his strike-back: not Twitter, but Crain's own blog. In the comments section, de Botton wrote:

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon - so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as 'nice' in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It's only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

"I will hate you till the day I die." "She's a moron." "May she rot in hell." Wow. One can only marvel at this kind of venom, being unveiled in such a public way, and with so much sanctimoniousness. De Botton does himself no favors by claiming that he is backed up by "all those who have read [his book] with anything like impartiality," as if he is the judge of who has or hasn't read his work with "impartiality." The irony is that to the outsider, Crain's write-up of de Botton's book reads like the kind of classy old-school review that every author hopes for; if such a review turns out to be negative, you're supposed to just suck it up as par for the course. In reality, the classy old-school review is a doomed species. So every review one manages to score carries that much more proportional weight.

In the end, de Botton, like Hoffman, recanted. Sort of. De Botton claimed, on another website, that he mistook his posting for "private" correspondence, saying metaphorically that it had been "inadvertently broadcast" to a wider audience than he had imagined.

I suspect that "outbursts" like Hoffman's and "naive" responses like de Botton's are the signs of a larger frustration most writers are feeling, not only about mainstream criticism, but with the at-large and ad-hoc culture of criticism that we all live with now. Writers are more beleaguered than ever, not least because we are more at the mercy of opinion than ever -- so many motherfucking opinions! The rant-and-post reviewer, on Amazon, on a blog, in a tweet, invests nothing more than a few minutes of his or her time, and the writer, who has put in a lot of time, has to live with the spleen. What writer can't relate to de Botton's plaintive wail: "that's two years of work down the drain"?  And what writer didn't feel for Alice Hoffman when in the end she retracted, with this bit of humble pie: "Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing"?

This is a dilemma that strikes me close to home. I got a shitty review from Robert Julian in the Bay Area Reporter for my second novel, You Can Say You Knew Me When, one that appeared early in the book's life and thus (as I saw it), managed to poison the climate for the novel's release. But I didn't—I couldn't—go on the offensive against Julian, no matter how much I thought his reading of my book was shallow and off-mark; because Robert Julian was the very critic whose enthusiastic review of my first novel, The World of Normal Boys, was among the earliest and strongest boosts I'd received. How could the same guy who loved my first book so much hate my second to the same degree? I didn't understand it; neither could I attack him for meanspiritedness or anything else. It seemed best to simply ignore him, and what he'd written about me, but it wasn't easy, knowing that the review was out there, casting its influence. Once the sting of his slam wore off, I came away with the understanding that a review, good or bad, is no more the "truth" than any other single opinion. But you still have to live with it.

The ability for the single opinion to find a platform, and an audience, is what writers are so pissed off about. Every opinion gets heard today, whether on Amazon or Twitter or someone's Facebook page or some random blog. Opinions get dashed off all the time, and writers suffer for them, and people like Alice Hoffman and Alain de Botton—and my writer friend who used her Twitter account to wish her reviewer a hellish afterlife—all seem to be saying at the very same moment: You're entitled to your opinion. And I'm entitled to offer, in response, a very loud Fuck You.

Lit for Pride

Few things put a smile on my face more than walking into my favorite bookstore and finding my novel on special display, complete with a Staff Favorite card attached. I snapped this pic at Books Inc. in the Castro, where their LGBT Pride Month rack gave a top-shelf slot to You Can Say You Knew Me When.

Most gay writers seem to object to the "gay writer" designation to some degree -- David Sedaris just put his ambivalence on record, saying that yes, he is a gay writer, but please don't shelve his books in "the ghetto" -- though you can't deny that this kind of prominence puts you right in the face of potential readers. (In San Francisco, June is a big month for queer tourists, some of whom are going to wander into a store like Books Inc. and buy something the staff recommends.) No writer wants his or her audience limited, but not everyone has Sedaris's platform or visibility.

Indeed, invisibility is an ongoing issue for books by queer writers, as yesterday's infuriating column in the Washington Post Book World makes clear. Asked by a reader to recommend a "new gay book," editor Dennis Drabelle responds, "not many of these are being published anymore," then goes on to recommend a single British novel many years out of print. As awesome queer website Band of Thebes observed of Drabelle's idiocy,

A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books.

I was at the Lambda Awards last month, and I can assure you that many, many queer-themed books are being published. (Check out the gathered GLBTerati from that night on Homo-Neurotic.com ... I was there in a chartreuse ascot, and posed for this pic with short story writer Justin Torres.) Band of Thebes offers a list of authors whose "new gay books" might have made for a better answer from Drabelle. A couple of current suggestions from my own shelf: Rakesh Satyal's Blue Boy, a beautifully composed tale of a grade school baby-gay who finds transcendence through voyeurism, the Hindu god Krishna and early-90s-era Whitney Houston; Vestal McIntyre's Lake Overturn, which weaves together many stories of the residents (both gay and not) of one Idaho town; Drew Ferguson's The Totally Screwed Up Life of Charlie the Second, a funny, sexy first-person teen romp; and Trebor Healey's A Perfect Scar and Other Stories, just re-released , which includes a heartbreaking favorite, "The Mercy Seat." And those are just by the boys.

Seems to me that Dennis Drabelle and The Washington Post Book World ought to print an apology. And how about reviewing a couple of new queer titles while you're at it?

Meanwhile, if anyone needs any evidence that those who hate queers understand the power of gay-themed books, check out this story about Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, first posted on Salon and then covered on the Advocate. A wingnut "Christian" group has not only attempted to ban this book from a library's shelves -- they actually WANT TO BURN IT.

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

Friends With Books: Catherine, Mary, Ada, Mattilda

Friends with books are making news all over the Interweb.

The new short story collection I'm most excited about has just been released: Catherine Brady's The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories. Catherine (or "Kate") and I are in a monthly writers' group, so I've been devouring her beautifully crafted stories in their early drafts for the past few years. Now the world gets to share the wealth. Kate's been honored before by the Flannery O'Connor Award and the Best American Short Stories -- this collection will surely bring more deserved attention her way. I hear there's a release party coming soon. Yay, Kate!

Mary Patrick Kavanaugh -- one of my former students -- had been trying to get the publishing world's attention for her novel, Family Plots: Love, Death and Tax Evasion. Having failed to do so, she staged a very public funeral, "burying" her dream of publishing (watch the festivities here). As it turns out, this got her -- and her now-self-published novel -- a lot of attention. Way to make lemonade, Mary.

Ada Limon -- whose poetry collection, Lucky Wreck, has a lyrical, conversational voice, as if you're listening to her talk intimately, sometimes heatedly, from one table over -- shows up on the Poetry Foundation site offering Five Ways to Practice Poetry. She's got plenty of useful reminders for aspiring writers, like "Cultivate silence... Your own voice is the only thing your poetry needs." Thanks, Ada.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, back from book-tour-land, is interviewed on The Rumpus, and you know he speaks his mind. Mattilda has been chronicling queer, sex-worker, activist/artist life in San Francisco on the page and in performance for years. Now there's a new book that collects this addictive, caustic, wry, observant, effusive writing: So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. I've started reading it, and I'm hooked. Good work, Mattilda.

The Month of Bests

December. The days get shorter. The lists get longer. The best-of lists, that is. I always greet the end-of-the-year best-of-books lists with trepidation. Did these reviewers really read all those books? Really? What was I doing while they were reading newly released hardcovers every week? (Oh yeah, that's right...I was reading student novels-in-progress, and rereading classics to teach for my lit class, not to mention editing all those own drafts of that manuscript of mine that's due any day now...)

Mostly I like best-of lists so I can figure out what to read next year. I'm always a year behind. I just started Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which was everyone's end-of-year favorite in 2007. He's the guy who wrote Jesus' Son, and this is his big fat scary Vietnam novel. A soldier shoots a monkey for no good reason on p. 1. Nice hook, Mr. Johnson.

Books I read this year that you might want to are below. They're all by gay writers, because, no secret, when I read for pleasure, that's what I like to read. Not that any of these books are anything like any of the others. I'm not that programmatic. Plus, when do those mainstream reviewers ever give gay writers more than token attention? Am I right or am I right?

Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer. He wrote the Confessions of Max Tivoli, about the guy born old who ages backwards and dies a baby. This new novel is less conceptual, but it has a few tricks up its sleeves. Mostly, it's full of believable people forced make tough choices. It's set in San Francisco in the 1950's. You think you know what's going to happen, and then you're wrong. Sentence by sentence, it's beauteous.

The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. "Listen. Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story." That's just the first paragraph. Myths, magic and family drama ensue. Ever been to Lebanon? Me neither. You should listen.

King of Shadows by Aaron Shurin. Essays that take small moments and blow them up into epic lyrical insight. Or that take big transformations and focus them down to the telling details. My favorite piece is called "In the Bars of Heaven and Hell" and it's about coming out in Berkeley in the late '60s. Every memoir should transport you like this. Buy it.

The Sixth Form by Tom Dolby. Take the Hansel and Gretel myth and relocate it on the campus of a New England prep school, with two boys, best friends, and their attentive but ultimately creepy teacher. Those college years are painful indeed, and Tom makes it all so real. I gobbled this one up in a day.

The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Edited by Mark Ford. There was already an O'Hara "selected poems," and a "collected poems," plus "Poems Retrieved" and a few other volumes. But this one got the full hardcover treatment from Borzoi Books, with a dreamy cover photo and the New Yorker and NY Times weighing in. I've loved O'Hara for years and wonder if all this highbrow attention is going to turn him into just another boring canonical figure. Please, God, no! He was an out flaming queen in the McCarthy era. And he's still my all-time all time favorite poet of art and love.

You can see the NY Times 2008 favorites here. Salon's here. Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan weighed in with some recession-priced paperbacks. And Amazon does a gay books list that puts David Sedaris at the top.

I'm sure you have your own opinion...

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.

Friends With Books: Martin Wilson

Martin Wilson reviewed my first novel for the Lambda Book Report, and not long after that we met at a gay writer's conference and struck up a correspondence. (The conference was the now-defunct Behind Our Masks -- terrible title for an "out" event -- which has sort of been reborn as the annual New Orleans queer writers gathering called Saints and Sinners -- which sounds like a whole 'nother animal). We last hung out at the Texas Book Festival, which is to say, um, in the bars of Austin. Anyway...

Martin sends word of his just published first-novel, What They Always Tell Us.

I'll be doing a few readings and events this fall in New York, NY; Tuscaloosa, AL; Austin, TX; and Nashville, TN. I'll be sure and send those details when I have them.

Yay for Martin!  Maybe a return to Austin is in order...