Violette Leduc

The bisexual novelist, memoirist, and poet Violette Leduc remains largely ignored by both academia and the reading public. Unluckily, she lived through tumultuous times, two world wars at the very least, and with a consistently neurotic personality. Her writing is mostly focused on the women to whom she had been attracted. But her writing, at its best, is arguably the sharpest of her milieu, praised by the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet. It was only La Bâtarde that received any notable public praise -- the book won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Thérèse and Isabelle was originally part of that first successful novel but was removed for its strong lesbian suggestiveness by the publisher.

Fiction by Violette Leduc, Translation by Derek Coltman:
excerpt from Thérèse and Isabelle

Essay by Jane Rule:
Violette Leduc, an excerpt from Lesbian Images

More in this issue:

Also featuring Martin Hyatt, Ron Drummond, and Michael Griffo

With works by Jane Rule, Jan Clausen, Jess Wells, Rob Shelsky, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin McLellan, Freda Karpf, Justin Vicari, Hansa Bergwall, and Christopher Barnes

Ihara Saikaku

Ihara Saikaku had a penchant for poetry, as well as a gift for writing plays and novels with a radical flair. He was known for taking risks in his works. In fact, he worked to free poetry from the conventional rigid forms and restricted themes, advocating that it be read in a more natural manner. And all of this in seventeenth-century Japan. He could compose thousands of stanzas in a single sitting. His stories were populated by merchants, rogues, misers, warriors, and amorous women. I first came to know Saikaku's work through a used copy of his story collection, Comrade Loves of the Samurai. These queer romances seem far ahead of their time, certainly more sexually-liberated than the popular literature of the West at that time, but to the Japanese of the Edo period, such love among the samurai was not only permissible, but admired.

Works by Ihara Saikaku:
Fiction: The Tragic Love of Two Enemies
Poetry: Cats

More in this issue:

Also featuring Amie M. Evans, Maureen Seaton, and a Rob Beeston interview by Richard Canning

With works by Rob Beeston, Rebekah Eppley, Harry Thomas, Maureen Seaton, Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor, Trebor Healey, Reginald Harris, Darrah de jour, D. Antwan Stewart, Terry Jaensch, and Paul Ocampo

Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes is most widely known for her Symbolist and Decadent novel Nightwood but in fact composed several novels and story collections, including Ladies Almanack and the semi-autobiographical Ryder. She was also a masterful playwright, a poet, and an illustrator. Though perhaps she was quite hard to pinpoint in her personal and sexual life, as so many a Bohemian of her age, her works have been an inspiration to generations of lesbians and gay men, including such luminaries as Truman Capote. She died in 1982 in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Works by Djuna Barnes:
Fiction: What Do You See, Madam?
Interview: The Confessions of Helen Westley

More in this issue:

Also featuring Philip Huang and Toni Mirosevich

With works by Scott Pomfret, Jan Steckel, Anel I. Flores, Charles Jensen, Holly Demeter, Carrie Katz, Heathen Machinery, Adam Seth Rosen, and Casey Charles

Marilyn Hacker

Award-winning poet, editor, activist, native New Yorker, and expatriate American in Paris, Marilyn Hacker is a beacon in our troubled times. She has said, "It's not a question of an issue, but a question of the people I know who are close to me, who are health-care workers or living with illnesses, or the neighbors, housed and homeless, I pass on the street, or the grocery store that goes out of business where I've bought my salad and broccoli every day for the past five years. All of those may be reflected or transformed in my work."

Poems by Marilyn Hacker:
Glose, Letter to Alfred Corn, Ghazal, Glose

More in this issue:

Also featuring Patricia Ryan, Katia Noyes, and Scott Hightower

With works by Gina Abelkop, Noël Alumit, Billy Clem, Thomas Filippi, Nadyalec Hijazi, Lesley Kartali, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Suzanne Nielsen, Leigh Phillips, and Emanuel Xavier

Jean Sénac

The life of writer Jean Sénac, like his friend and mentor, Albert Camus, was deeply affected by the politics of his time and the task of reconciling two opposed cultures. He was a gay, Catholic, French-Algerian poet in a socialist state founded on Arab-Muslim principles, ultimately assassinated in 1973 for his convictions. He published his poems widely and successfully in France, though his works have rarely been published into English. We are quite proud to offer what are among the very first English translations of his poems and prose, by a diverse trio of writers, including the entire chapbook, The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm.

Poetry by Jean Sénac:

• translated from the French by David Bergman and Katia Sainson:
  My People's Early Rising, The Sleepers, and Love's Rights
• translated from the French by Justin Vicari:
  The Myth of the Mediterranean Sperm

Autobiography by Jean Sénac:

• translated from the French by Katia Sainson:
  An excerpt from The Father: A Rough Draft

More in this issue:

Also featuring Brian Sloan and Neil de la Flor

With works by Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Tom Dolby, Sean Meriwether, Lauren Sanders, Shaun Levin, Paul G. McCurdy, Liz Henry, Louie Crew, Amanda Laughtland, Paul Rueckhaus, Mike W. Blottenberger, James Justus Ross, and Michael Montlack

Lillian Faderman

The daughter of an immigrant Jewish garment worker whose family perished in the Holocaust, Lillian Faderman dreamed of being an actress. Instead she worked her way through college by posing for nude photographs and stripping in burlesque clubs. She discovered that her deepest erotic and emotional connections were to women. Today, she is a groundbreaking scholar of gay and lesbian studies, author of numerous books on subjects as diverse as 17th-century lesbian literature to the Hmong refugees of Laos, and the recipient of a host of awards such as the 2004 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement and the 2002 Founders Distinguished Senior Scholar Award.

Prose by Lillian Faderman:

• Excerpts from Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers
• Love Between Women in 1928: Why Progressivism Is Not Always Progress

More in this issue:

Also featuring Patrick Roscoe, Christine Hamm, and Kim Yaged

With works by David Pratt, Valerie Frankel, Dallas Angguish, Morteza Baharloo, Michelle Auerbach, Steven Schwartz, Abe Louise Young, Stacy Nathaniel Jackson, Danny Thanh Nguyen, Judith Jordan, and S. Bear Bergman

Mark Doty

Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation -- the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T.S. Eliot Prize in Britain -- and has established himself as one of the most courageous and eloquent poets of our time. In his numerous books of poems and prose, he has merged the political with the aesthetic, chronicled seaside Provincetown and everyday American life, and taught us how to cope nobly and gracefully with disaster. We're honored to include him in our pages.

Essay by Mark Doty:
Infernal Sympathies

More in this issue:

Also featuring Jose Skinner, Wayne Johns, and a Dodie Bellamy interview by Julia Bloch

With works by Michelle Tea, Harry Thomas, Michael Graves, Amy Silver, Alex Romani, Susan Stinson, Elijah Oberman, Justin Thomas, Cindy M. Emch, Laura Jent, and Mako Matsuda

David Bergman

David Bergman is a writer of many posts -- as a social historian he eloquently documented the lives and works of gay literature's greatest lodestars, among them the Violet Quill members, and here for the first time, Essex Hemphill; as a poet he has been widely published and was awarded the George Elliston Prize; and as an editor he collected Edmund White's essays in The Burning Library and the amazing and diverse stories in the Men on Men fiction series.

Prose by David Bergman:
The Condition of Essex Hemphill

Poetry by David Bergman:
Sunday Morning, Sons of Onan, Eos, The Testimony of Orpheus, Sabbatical, Song of Solomon

More in this issue:

Also featuring Tennessee Jones, Frances Varian, and Kato McNickle

With works by Brian Pera, Meliza Bañales, Nicholas Hayes, Jennifer Fink, Michael Kiggins, Qwo-Li Driskill, Steven Cordova, Stephanie Gray, Cyril Wong, and Christopher DeRoche

Elana Dykewomon

Elana Dykewomon (as you can imagine from her name) is a lesbian's lesbian. But if you haven't read her you'll be delighted to hear that she's a thinker's writer, in a category with Sarah Schulman and Lillian Faderman as one of our great minds, capable of complex insights and rigorous analysis of what makes culture tick.

Interview by Jess Wells:
Interview with Elana Dykewomon

Works by Elana Dykewomon:
Poetry: The Leonids of 2001: Susan sees her first shooting star
Memoir: Milk and Honey

More in this issue:

Also featuring Keith Banner, kari edwards, and Joan Larkin

With works by Alissa Blackman, Jim Tushinski, Royston Tester, Ian Philips, Jan Steckel, John Del Peschio, Karyna McGlynn, Charlotte Young, Yuri Hospodar, Myriam Gurba, and Robert Siek

Truong Tran

An experimental poet with a sense of humor, 35-year-old Truong Tran writes dense prose that manages to flow freely. "A voluptuary of the difficult real," said Kathleen Fraser. "To be entered, and entered. Gratefully." A finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and Western States Book Award for his two published collections placing the accents and dust and conscience, Truong is the Executive Director of The Kearney Street Workshop in San Francisco.

Poetry by Truong Tran:
because and eight margins

More in this issue:

Also featuring Philip Huang, Maya Khosla, Michel Paulin Laurent, and David Caudle

With works by Shani Mootoo, Matthew Graham Smith, Joneil Adriano, R. Zamora Linmark, Juliana Pegues, Minal Hajratwala, Shailja Patel, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Doric Wilson

Playwright Doric Wilson deftly survived both the Stonewall Riots and New York City's off-off Broadway. His first play And He Made Her opened at the famed Caffé Cino in 1961, and with subsequent productions, such as The West Street Gang and Street Theater, he earned his place as one of our best playwrights. He co-founded The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS), the first out professional theatre company, as well as Circle Repertory Theater, and in 1994 he received the very first Robert Chesley Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Theatre. Edward Albee once told Wilson that he was "too nice to be a playwright," but Wilson's life in the theatre shows just how well nice guys can do.

Drama by Doric Wilson:
Now She Dances!, a fantasia on the trial of Oscar Wilde in two acts

More in this issue:

Also featuring Clint Catalyst, Marty McConnell, and Linda Eisenstein

With works by Marshall Moore, Andy Quan, Susan Stinson, Allen Ellenzweig, Maria Benevento, Ron Mohring, Amy King, Peggy Munson, Ali Liebegott, Raymond Luczak, and Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

Robert Glück

Named as one of the ten best postmodern fiction writers in North America by the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and likened to Jean Genet by the late William Burroughs, Robert Glück's most recent book, Denny Smith, is a collection of stories published by Matthew Stadler's Clear Cut Press. He is the author of eight other books of poetry and fiction, including Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, and has published prose, poetry, and critical articles in magazines and anthologies as diverse as New Directions, Artforum International, and Best American Erotica. He's currently an editor of Narrativity, a Web site on narrative theory, and writes for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors.

Fiction by Robert Glück:
On the Boardwalk

Interview by Brian Bouldrey:
Gabbing With Robert Glück

More in this issue:

Also featuring Peggy Munson, Ryka Aoki de la Cruz, and Daniel Curzon

With works by Tom House, Jenie Pak, Allison Burnett, D. Travers Scott, Rafaelito V. Sy, Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, Shannon Holman, CAConrad, Anya Miller, Randall Mann, and Taylor Mac Bowyer

Patricia Nell Warren

Patricia Nell Warren has been writing professionally since the age of seventeen. In over forty years, she's published eight novels and numerous articles and poems in journals across the globe. Her most successful novel, The Front Runner, has subsequently become our most popular gay love story. Patricia Nell Warren's work as an activist includes efforts in the 1960s to have American media recognize the individuality of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the USSR, and her role in the 1970s as the plaintiffs' spokesperson for Susan Smith vs. Reader's Digest, a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a class-action victory for women. Today, she focuses on free speech and issues confronting our youth, as well as public health concerns through her controversial monthly column in A&U, America's AIDS magazine.

From Beginning to New Beginning: A Cycle of Poetry
Introduction

Untitled Poem, Case History, Anti-Season, Excerpt from "Some Kind Of Kasida", The Matador's Prayer, Excerpts from "Minimal Poems", Memoirs

More in this issue:

Also featuring C. Bard Cole, Jeffery Beam, and Troy Hill

With works by Alicia Curtis, Lou Dellaguzzo, Randy Turoff, Sean Meriwether, Sara Seinberg, Don Adams, Alan Pedder, Ali Lemer, Trebor Healey, and Chip Livingston

Edmund White

Edmund White remains one of the most influential novelists and cultural critics of our times. In the mid-1970s, he and six other gay New York writers formed the infamous Violet Quill Club. The French government has named him an officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and his novels have been praised by writers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov, Gore Vidal, and Susan Sontag. These include his classic novel, A Boy's Own Story, which in 2002 was republished in its 20th anniversary edition by the Modern Library. We are honored and thankful to feature an exclusive peek at his new novel, Fanny: A Fiction, expected to be published in September 2003 by Ecco HarperCollins.

Fiction by Edmund White:
Mississippi Tales, an excerpt from Fanny: A Fiction

More in this issue:

Also featuring Noël Alumit, Michelle Tea, and Avery Crozier

With works by Michael Carroll, Holly Farris, Neil Thornton, Bara Swain, Rigoberto González, Melanie Braverman, Frances-Kim Russell, and Lisa Asagi

Jewelle Gomez

Jewelle Gomez is one of few writers who so beautifully encapsulate what a storyteller is and has the power to be in our modern world. In addition to her fiction, essays, and poems, she's served on literary panels such as those for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, was a member of the original staff of "Say Brother," one of the first weekly, black television shows in the United States (WGBH-TV Boston), and was on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). She is currently on the national advisory boards of the National Center for Lesbian Rights; Poets & Writers, Inc.; and the Human Sexuality Archives of Cornell University. We are proud to debut four new poems.

Poems by Jewelle Gomez:
for the Streetcar, Femme to Femme, Femme to Butch, Our Own Viet Nam: 7 random snapshots

More in this issue:

Also featuring Jess Wells, T. Cole Rachel, and Brian Thorstenson

With works by Robert Weaver, Eric Brandt, Andrew Horwitz, Shelley Ettinger, Mary Meriam, Dallas Angguish, Priscilla Rhoades, Julianne Bonnet, and Krandall Kraus

Michael Lassell

Michael Lassell was born in New York in 1947. After far too much education, he settled for a 15-year sojourn in Los Angeles in 1976, where he began a career in journalism and publishing most forms of the written and spoken word, including the award-winning books Poems for Lost and Un-lost Boys and Decade Dance. His work as an editor, including The Name of Love: Classic Gay Love Poems and The World In Us: Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave, has made a significant and lasting contribution to our community. His poetry convinces us we're old friends who've let each other in on secrets. His next book project is a social history and architectural examination of Celebration, the Orlando town founded by Disney near its Florida theme parks, and he is meanwhile working on his next book of poems, tentatively titled Fingerprints and Battlefields.

Poems by Michael Lassell:
Boys in Foreign Climes, The Passing of an August Saturday, Death and 42nd Street, The Day George Harrison Died

More in this issue:

Also featuring Alexander Chee, Meliza Bañales, and Nicola Harwood

With works by Tennessee Jones, Aaron Shurin, Matthew Clark Davison, Heather Mitchell, Travis Montez, Cris Hernandez, Shauna Rogan, Randall Mann, Sara S. Moore, and Michael Mastrofrancesco

Katherine V. Forrest

What impresses and inspires most about a great woman like Katherine Forrest is her devotion to the GLBT community and its poets and writers. The value that she places on our work and its continuation is certainly the value we should all place on it. Be sure -- we're lucky to speak and be heard and we have something precious in our literature. We can be remembered not only correctly but in our own words. We have something precious in Katherine Forrest, too. "The Politics of Pride" chaperones us through the lesbian writer's remarkable career spanning 14 books and 20 years.

Essay by Katherine V. Forrest:
The Politics of Pride

More in this issue:

Also featuring Elizabeth Stark, Emanuel Xavier, and Garret Jon Groenveld

With works by Trebor Healey, Matthew Bernstein Sycamore, Robert Dunbar, Joyce Luck, Julia Bloch, Dani Montgomery, Ragan Fox, Shane Luitjens, Craig Fox

Felice Picano

Felice Picano's first book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Since then he has published twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, and memoir. Considered a founder of modern gay literature along with other members of the Violet Quill Club, Picano also founded two publishing companies exclusively publishing the work of gay authors: SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York. His exhibit "Early Gay Presses of New York," debuted at the ONE Institute in Los Angeles and will be in San Francisco's Central Library beginning November 15, 2002.

We present to Felice Picano the first of our lodestar designations. He has remained a paradigm of literary excellence to us for more than twenty-five years, yet his work in our community of writers has often exceeded the definition of lodestar. What follows is an exclusive essay by the prolific writer and selections from his unpublished diaries remarked upon by Washington, D.C. writer and editor at Chi Rho Press, Kevin Stone Fries.

Essay by Felice Picano:
My Problem with Time

Collection by Kevin Stone Fries:
The Felice Picano Diaries: Spring 1982

More in this issue:

Also featuring K.M. Soehnlein, Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, and Prince Gomolvilas

With works by Kevin Stone Fries, Sara McAulay, David Pratt, Christopher Lord, Daniel W.K. Lee, Thea Hillman, horehound stillpoint, Lauren Wheeler, Buddy Wakefield, Melissa Fondakowski, Michelle Maihiot, Malka Geffen