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Adventures in publishing, continued – the Rainbow Book Fair

April 20, 2015

After participating in the 7th annual Rainbow Book Fair in Manhattan April 18, I now understand the meaning of the phrase “flush with success,” not just because I sold a lot of books and made a lot of contacts, but because I had an altogether enriching experience.

Fashionably “flushed” was the state of many of the faces as it was the first warm day of spring, and the Holiday Inn Midtown, site of the fair, was in the midst of making the change from winter heating to summer air-conditioning – no easy task for modern buildings. Fair co-founder Daniel Kitchen explained that the event is usually slated for cooler March. (Rumor has it that it was bumped to April this year for a previously slated bar mitzvah.) Kitchen suggested that March is a better moment for the fair, but this author, no fan of winter, was perfectly content to spend a beautiful Saturday in her favorite month of April indoors talking books.

It helped that I was accompanied by my dear friends Mary Azzuriti and Wendy Pandolfi – my “bookends” as Mary called herself and Wendy – dressed in yellow sweaters and blue pants to complement my tennis ball yellow-green and navy outfit. Colors, naturally, reflected the colors of this blog and my book series “The Games Men Play” and its debut novel “Water Music,” about four gay athletes – two swimmers, two tennis players – and the way their professional rivalries color their personal relationships with one another.

These hues become the team colors of the New York Templars in the second novel I’m now refining, “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s quest for identity, acceptance, success and love amid the brutal beauty of the NFL. Chartreuse and deep blue then become the colors of Linwood Farms, which owns Criterion, the racehorse trying to win the Triple Crown in the planned third novel, “Criterion,” told in part from the horse’s viewpoint. (The fourth book returns us to the heroes of “Water Music” – older, sadder, wiser as they confront life’s greatest rival, death.) ...

‘Shipping’ news

February 23, 2015

Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...

The explosiveness of touch

February 11, 2015

“What an altered world we live in,” Frank Bruni wrote in his Sunday New York Times’ column.

“What an advanced one. The man I love and I can be married in New York or 35 other states if we ever get organized enough, if we decide that we want public vows and a gaudy cake — I’m thinking devil’s food, for a host of reasons — to seal our commitment.

“I’m grateful for that. I’m stunned, really.

“And yet. When we’re walking down the street after a long dinner or a sad movie and he slips his hand in mine, I tense."

Funny he should mention that. In my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding,” New York Templars’ quarterback Quinn Novak and his lover, San Francisco Miners’ quarterback Tam Tarquin, sometimes touch accidentally in public. It always sends an erotic jolt through Quinn, and yet, to Quinn’s relief and dismay, they always pull quickly away. ...

The once and future king

November 14, 2014

You would think that someone whose earthly life ended more than 2,000 years ago would be beyond controversy. But then look at Jesus. He’s still “a sign to be contradicted,” to quote the Gospels, almost two millennia after he was crucified.

So it is with Alexander the Great. Some 330 years before Jesus was born, this king of Macedon and hegemon of Greece conquered the Persian Empire, ushering in a Hellenistic age that would unite East and West. (The reason we call Jesus Christ “Jesus Christ” is because of the Alexandrian spread of the Greek language and culture.)

Such is the Alexander mystique – he never lost a battle but died at age 32 in Babylon, possibly of cerebral malaria – that he thrives in the imagination today as a metaphor for many things, including leadership from the front; the ultimate gay in the military (many consider him to have been the lover of his right-hand man, Hephaestion); and the tension between East and West.

That tension has escalated recently with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s decision to give waxworks of Alexander, his father, Philip II of Macedon and his mother, Olympias, pride of place in a new archaeological museum in the capital city of Skopje, which already has the world’s largest statue of Alexander in its central square.

A little background here...

Alan Turing, gay sex and the real ‘Imitation Game’

November 11, 2014

Thanks to Marshall Fine, critic-in-residence at The Picture House in Pelham, I had the opportunity recently to preview “The Imitation Game,” which has “Oscar nods” written all over it, deservedly so. It’s a superbly crafted film about a story that resonates in our own time, acted with the kind of understated emotion that is the hallmark of British performance by a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Keira Knightley.

The film, which opens Nov. 28, tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II by creating a machine that was the forerunner of the computer, saving millions of lives in the process (although that, we shall see, was complicated).

Turing was a man ahead of his time in many ways. Today he’d be a gay Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Instead he was a closeted social misfit – taunted mercilessly at prep school in the savage way that belongs exclusively to children and later prosecuted when his homosexuality was uncovered after the war. Forced to choose chemical castration in lieu of a prison sentence, he committed suicide in 1954 at age 41 – one of 49,000 men prosecuted for homosexual acts in England between 1885 and 1967. In 2013, Turing was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II – which still implies he did something wrong to begin with. ...

The new black (Hint: It isn’t orange)

November 2, 2014

I owe the inspiration for this post to my friend and WAG magazine colleague Ronni Diamondstein, a writer with superb taste in literature, as befits a former librarian.

Ronni, who has lived in and written about The Netherlands, recommended Jessie Burton’s new novel “The Miniaturist” (Ecco/Harper Collins, $26.99, 400 pages) – a book that I devoured one evening and that has made me despair of being a novelist as it is such a marvelous evocation of Holland in the 17th century. (Think Tracy Chevalier’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” only darker.) You can almost smell the tang of the water rising from the canals and the sea.

“The Miniaturist” is about a country girl with an old family name but little money who arrives in Amsterdam...

Sam, I am

September 7, 2014

As we might’ve predicted, the presence of Michael Sam in the NFL is bringing out the worst in humanity.

First, the NFL, according to NBC’s Peter King, asked around if any team had interest in putting Sam, the league’s first openly gay player, on its practice squad after the St. Louis Rams cut him, basically to avoid a PR disaster – not because the guy’s good and deserves a chance or even because the league is standing up for what’s right.

Meantime, the Dallas Cowboys bit and now a group calling itself American Decency will protest the Cowboys’ home opener against the San Francisco 49ers Sunday, Sept. 7. Gee, wonder if American Decency is going to protest spousal abuse, gun possession, drunk driving, dogfights and any of the NFL’s other little extracurricular activities.

I’ll be rooting for my Niners but go, Sam.