Perfectly Queer: July Lit Event, Summer Reading and Serious Themes

Another reading, another bookstore! July 11, I will be part of a reading and panel discussion with two other authors at the new home for LGBT events with Books Inc, at Opera Plaza on 601 Van Ness Avenue. The Market Street/Castro district store closed, as you may know.

Here's the link to Books Inc's listing for my reading with Michael Aleynikov, author of Ivan and Misha: Stories, and Na’amen Gobert Tilahun, author of The Root: A Novel of the Wrath & Athenaeum.

Aleynikov's connected stories share the intimate lives of two brother immigrants trying to survive in Brooklyn with their own family troubles and strife.

ADA Anniversary; 25 years of progress, but still a long way to go

By setting my last two novels in the early 1980s, I gave myself an advantage (age-wise, I knew how to place the characters' similar life events) and a disadvantage (the Americans with Disabilities Act would be years to come, not enacted until July 26, 1990). But it's still worth noting what could –and might– happen to Everett, the paraplegic character in these books, in his years ahead.

Robert L. Burgdorf, Jr. wrote a lengthy article in The Washington Post about how he (and others) wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act and worked to get it passed.

Pennsylvania Pride

As LGBT Pride events fill our national (and international) calendars, I want to focus on Pennsylvania, and the setting of my two most recent novels, where it seems the fictional dreams of my protagonists have come true.

Some background about the two novels Every Time I Think of You and Message of Love (with some minor spoilers).

Dancing in the streets of Pittsburgh

In 1979, Everett Forrester's sister and father live in Pittsburgh, and in the first novel, the two young men's first awkward romantic night is spent in Squirrel Hill, a scenic neighborhood similar to Shadyside.
 
This May, people were dancing in the streets in the neighborhood of Shadyside after Pennsylvania's same-sex marriage ban was declared unconstitutional. (Photo by Michael Henninger/Post-Gazette)

Livin' in the Eighties

Brits celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher

The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher serves as the final nail in the coffin of the 1980s. While politicians, including our own duplicitous president, chose to commemorate Thatcher's "strength" and power, others, including British citizens who survived her  establishment, know from their life experience, that the decade was one of hardship, capitalist corruption, and utter cruelty.