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May Publishing Notes

The buzz:

In 2010 Seal Press will publish Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman's nonfiction anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. ** This fall, Dark Scribe Press will publish Lee Thomas’s short story collection In the Closet, Under the Bed. ** Rebel Satori Press will publish Shane Allison’s debut volume of poetry this fall, tentatively titled Twenties. Other new titles include Shy by Kevin Killian, U by Rob Stephenson, Love Hard by D. Travers Scott, Chick Band by Rakelle Valencia, Against by Riley MacLeod, DeVante's Coven by S.M. Johnson, Pop-Up Book of Death by Chad Helder, and our bodies are beauty inducers by jj hastain. ** Alyson will publish Scott Kenan's memoir, Seeking the Kindness of Strangers: My Days with Tennessee Williams, about working with the playwright during six months in 1981. ** Lethe Press will be releasing in early summer of this year the first issue of Icarus, a gay speculative fiction magazine. The inaugural issue will contain an essay by Jeff Mann, fiction by Joel Lane and Jameson Currier, reviews of recent publications, and pieces on the Gaylactic Network, a national fandom organization for gay men.

RIP: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

In a not an unironic juxtaposition, Epistemology of the Closet author Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has died at the age of 59.

#AmazonFail

Honestly, I'm pretty cheered by the response to #AmazonFail: so many people upset about censorship, and censorship of LGBT, sex-positive, and related topics. Not a bad thing at all. There's a reasonably good summation at CNET and at WiredPen (which has the PW report about it being caused by a glitch) (& there's my post from yesterday about it, with links to a lot of the original sources).

A Queer and a Fag Go See Yonder Mountain

i love the Yonder Mountain String Band so much, I miss them already. Two nights was not enough.

They do something for me that the Ramones did, back in 1976:  they make everything that came before sound like history.

Before they even came on, at the Fillmore, the audience was treated to Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug, BTO’s Taking Care of Business, and Chicago’s 25 Or 6 To 4.  Their parents’ music, I think, the stuff they grew up with (I’d bet on it), these young men who have rediscovered bluegrass and made it seem new again.

They are children of the Dead, of course, but there's a lot more going on as well. Sometimes they sound like a trance dance band, using bluegrass to get there.

I hear Roxy Music in their music, Nazareth, Credence Clearwater, and I also hear the faintest ever echo of My Bloody Valentine.  They have layers, Yonder Mountain does.

It’s hard for me to talk about the music they did at the Fillmore, because 90% of the material was unfamiliar to me. I have two CD’s by this band, so I should have been recognizing some songs. In fact, they only did one or two numbers from Town by Town, and none off their most recent set. My jaw dropped on the floor when I realized they were doing No Expectations by the Rolling Stones. Girlfriend is Better was less of a surprise, considering that the String Cheese used to include something by Talking Heads in many of their shows. But starting the second set of the second night in San Francisco with the Allman Brothers’ Whipping Post ?

That’s not just genius, that’s genius with balls.

Blog Diet & Porn: Jerry made me do it.

Dear Jerry: I was just thinking about Blogging as a dirty little secret, something akin to jacking off one does in private but given our technology and a good doze of human ingenuity, one never knows who is watching.

Indeed, these days that we all want to be 'reality stars', we hope someone is. Before reading your evocative piece on porn posted today on April 12, 09, and the distance we used to go to get a fix, I was also thinking I should go on a “blog diet” and write more often here and I thought, “who reads it anyway”, who reads this -- blogging and twittering -- also being somewhat like porn , parlors, arcades in the old times. Many of us do it, like bees, and bunnies, and to think that I always thought I was the only degenerate there, lost forever, so young and addicted to sleaze environments and sex and porn.  Certainly some of it was exactly that, the loneliness and desperation of an immigrant  kid growing up HIV positive, a hangover of that fucking Catholicism and growing up in a political dictatorship, all good excuses for none of my behaviour but strong reasons for all of it, as I have painfully cleared with my dear shrink.

Kansas City Fucking Company

One of the unfortunate aspects of getting older than no one warned me about is the loss of my icons. Death is, of course, inevitable no matter how successful you are, but lately it's as if someone has taken a chisel to my past and chipped away pieces until all I have left is a core of - at best - unreliable memory. Did things actually happen the way I remember them or do I just remember them the way I wanted them to happen? Either way, the memories are there and every time I recognize a name in the obituaries, they come flooding back.

Like Jack Wrangler.

He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, chiseled hunk of burnin' love - propelling many a session of self-love to a sticky conclusion for me. But this was the mid-70's, and porn wasn't as portable as it is today. Home videos were at least five years away and computers hadn't even entered into the national consciousness as anything other than confusing business machines. There were adult bookstores, to be sure - some with video arcades where you could drop a quarter in the slot and see 2 minutes of a 7 minute 16 mm film loop. Grainy and fuzzy, but porn nonetheless.

Queer Hets

I'm doing a talk soon in Milwaukee about queer heterosexuals, so I've been thinking and writing about the idea a lot. I've written about it before, spurred on by Tristan Taormino's column about it - which was a revelation when I first read it - but I know there are plenty who scoff at the idea and think only same-sex sex can BE queer. I'm not convinced, but then I know a lot of men who like to dress as women and get fucked by their girlfriends, and I know a lot of other people don't.

The question that it raises for me most often is the issue of identity. Is a person queer when they decide they are? Or are they queer because they do queer things? We know there are guys who have gay sex who don't identity as gay, right? So where exactly are the lines between the desires and the sex, or between the sex and the identity?

A PERFECT STORM OF BAD DECISIONS BY HOREHOUND STILLPOINT

I should’ve just stuck with buttmunching.

First paragraph, sentence one:  “So, this guy, last night, stuck his nose up my ass, and with his mouth free, asked, ‘How does that feel, my nose in your butt?’”

Yeah, I know what people want from me. Butts and balls, dick and tongue, ankles, nipples, lats, and thighs, all speaking the language of lusty fag. I’m supposed to open my mouth and swallow cock. Open this mouth and let cum dribble out. Open mouth and remove pubic hair. All or any of which would have been better than the spoken word thing I did last Sunday.

That God damned movie poster for Angels and Demons got me thinking about how my life has been full of both. Demons have been wicked funny and fiercely brutal, but it’s Angels who have no mercy whatsoever. No mercy, in the human sense, I mean. In the Bible ‘mercy’ means nothing but the presence of God. I know it’s tacky to bring up the Bible when speaking of Angels, but in that book, Angels are not Guardians of nice happy outcomes. Angels are messengers who bring the news and it’s not good. A visitation from an Angel means somebody is gonna suffer trials and tribulations. Someone’s about to burn on a stake. Some poor bastard has a date with a cross.

I wrote about skin covered with boils. Wrote about the Void of Hopeless Despair. Blood and pus and black clouds of carbon dust clinging to your day. See?  Not so much fun anymore, right?

Oh sure, there was one bit with Brad Pitt sucking on my dick . . . spreading his ass-cheeks and showing off his pink petunia . . . but it was too little too late for an afternoon crowd in a bar on Lombard Street, with a guy on guitar playing acoustic punk rock behind me.

April Publishing Notes

The buzz: This fall Alyson will publish Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS, edited by Philip Clark and David Groff. Contributors will include Thomas Avena, Tim Dlugos, Tory Dent, Essex Hemphill, Paul Monette, George Whitmore, and others. ** 

In April, Poets Wear Prada Press will publish Jee Leong Koh’s first full-length collection Equal to the Earth. Koh blogs here. **

This spring, Rebel Satori Press will published a tenth anniversary (and revised) edition of Emanuel Xavier’s novel Christ Like. **

Picador will publish Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation, exploring the connection between our private experiences of humiliation and our current fascination with the public humiliation of others. **

This fall Alyson will also publish Women of the Bite, edited by Cecilia Tan, a lesbian vampire erotica anthology, first published as an e-book by RavenousRomance.com.