Writing
To tell the truth, most of my writing “energy” these days
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 Europe, so the change of
getting lost in the pile increases daily. In any case, they’re here: VitaVagabonda and WendellNoose. Meanwhile, Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by
Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life has been out for two
years. (Total amount of royalties I’ve seen from the publisher to date:
$0.00.) I’m working, desultorily, on “Still Blue,” which is
an online writing project for queer and working-class writers. See more about
both on the Everything I Have Is Blue site. Nonetheless, as a demonstration of the principle of The Triumph of
Hope Over Experience, I keep plugging away at writing. My current projects include
a short-story collection, The Way It Happens, which so far is mostly proving
that the day a publisher looks favorably on queer-themed short stories (the
double kiss of death) will be the day The Shrub tells us the truth about “Weapons
of Mass Destruction.” 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. Translations aren’t a whole lot more 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 Piω o Meno alle Tre; 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. Talking of translations, the biggest surprise of recent years was
winning the Renato Poggioli PEN American Center Award in 2000 for my translation of the plays of Natalia Ginzburg from
Italian. You can go to the PEN
site and see my name in pixels!
(Scroll down; I'm a-a-a-ll the way at the bottom.) The Complete Plays
of Natalia Ginzburg has been accepted for publication
by the University of Toronto Press and will appear in 2008. 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
Niccolς 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
University of Southern Maine. Go here to take a peek at
it. 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.) In Summer 1996, the first issue appeared of Blood Brothers: The
Smutty Little Lit 'Zine for Men Who Boink Men.
Information about Blood Brothers, including how to order a copy, is
available. However.... |