Writing
These
days, most of my writing “energy” goes into blogging, which will
probably turn out to be the Death of Literature or the End of Life As We Know
It or some such. Blogs reproduce faster than bacteria or McDonald’s
franchises in Meanwhile, Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life has been out for just over three years. (Total amount of royalties I’ve seen from the publisher to date: $0.00.) Work is well under way on “Still Blue,” an online writing project for queer and working-class writers; as of this update, there are about a dozen really nice pieces on the site, including fiction, poetry, essays, and life writing. Translations aren’t particularly lucrative, but I’ve finished two novels and a memoir that I keep hoping will see print: Matteo B. Bianchi’s Generations of Love and Andrej Longo’s Around Three O’Clock; and Francesco Trento and Aureliano Amadei’s Twenty Cigarettes at Nassiriya, a first-hand account of the November 2003 suicide attack on the Italian base in Iraq. In addition, my translation of Matteo B. Bianchi’s marvelous Christmas fable for adults, Cher, Upon A Midnight Clear, is available here (approximately 786KB; 27 printed pages). Talking
of translations, The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays
of Natalia Ginzburg was published by the If
you want to see the whole publications list, it's here.
Scroll around to find links to a dozen or so pieces that are online. I had a great time in 2004 interviewing Italian director, Gabriele Salvatores, writing about his film Io Non Ho Paura (I’m Not Scared), and translating a short excerpt from Niccolò Ammaniti’s book of the same name. Here’s the piece I ended up doing for the folks at VirtualItalia – which is a great site, by the way. Check it out! And here are some other things that are online: A poem that appeared in New Millennium Writings, “Elegy for Matthew Shepard”; another poem (pretty smutty, so be warned), “Class Analysis”; “That Old Dog That Maysie Had“ (a short story); and “Heaven Only Knows,” a 10-minute play. Sean Meriwether at Velvet Mafia was kind enough to take “Units of Measurement: A Pornographic Morality Tale,” and I was glad to see it find a home at last (though I do not recommend the piece for Republicans, prigs, wowsers, or anyone who feels especially sentimental about Scott O'Hara). “Yard Ball” is a short-short story that was a finalist in the POZ/Artery fiction contest, and, finally, “The Way it Happens” is available on the Mississippi Review site. From
1984 to about 1997, I freelanced (emphasis on “free”) regularly
for magazines and newspapers both in the San Francisco Bay Area and
nationally. The best part of that was getting
to see and review a ton of performance,
mostly dance and theater. An omnibus piece on g/l theater appeared in Out in All Directions: The
Almanac of Lesbian and Gay America, in 1995; it's here. I also wrote some investigative pieces I'm proud of, such as an article for Out on Long Term AIDS Survivors; a two-part piece for the now-defunct QW on AIDS heretics, the corruption of AIDS activists, and (GASP!) theories that HIV does not cause AIDS; an unpublished report on the AIDS Cure Act of 1995; and an analysis of oral-sex safety, “Safe Sex Sucks.” Here's
a piece I wrote on the Supreme Court Civil Disobedience that was part of the
1987 March on Washington (at which the Names Project Quilt was unveiled for
the first time): “Full
Court Press.” “The End of the World As We
Know It ... And We Feel Fine” is the essay I wrote for the
premiere issue of Blood Brothers (about which, more below); you can
find it here. I've
also published a number of articles on lesbian/gay adoption and
foster-parenting, including a book, Lesbians and Gay Men As Foster Parents,
published in 1992 by the And occasionally, when so moved, I write book reviews. I
used to get paid minute sums of money to write reviews (such as this one of
Patricia Morrisroe's Mapplethorpe:
A Biography); now I write them for free on amazon.com,
which doesn't deserve me. But I figure, if every other bozo can post online
reviews, this bozo should be able to do the same. Anyway, here are reviews
of: Anthony Swofford's Jarhead; Stephen King's Dreamcatcher;
and Beth Loffreda's Remembering Matt Shepard.
(You see I run the gamut from low to a little bit lower culture.) |