March/April 1990
Remarks by Richard Howard
Richard Howard, Peter Klappert
Richard Howard began by recalling an early panel about homosexual writing in America, in 1963. The panelists included Paul Goodman-a figure Richard has learned to miss more and more, particularly for the kinds of things he said and the astonishing, often irritating way in which he said them-and Sanford Friedman, a writer Richard lived with at the time.
Read more...
Couldn't I Love You & Also Want to Go Dancing?*
Peter Klappert
On the night of the traditional AWP sock hop I walked into the Sheraton Palace ballroom, looked around, and said to myself, "Now who the hell are you going to dance with?" I didn't see any men I knew to be gay, but that wasn't quite the point. Gazing around the room I got the feeling that if I did dance with another man, at least some of the other partiers at the 1988 annual meeting would be shocked.
Read more...
Concerning Being Queer
Allan Gurganus
I'm the kind where- I've never met a Saint Sebastian I didn't like. - You getting the code here? So began a would-be witty speech I brought with me. But, as of this afternoon, my fellow travelers, I chucked that one. I see now: the first talk was based on certain assumptions. I assumed that-as a community of writers-we held much in common, most in common.
Read more...
Literary Cross-Dressing
Marianne Hauser
When I prepared to address the meting, I realized to what extent sex bias resembles old age bias. As a "senior citizen" and writer I've been subjected to either prejudice. But you may be any age to see the connection. Just watch some TV sitcom which drags in (with evident uneasiness) a gay man, or (with gross humor) a dotty grandma, and the parallel becomes blatantly clear.
Read more...
The Gay/Lesbian Writer in Context: The University, the Writing Community, The Marketplace: Introduction
Peter Klappert
The following comments and short essays are based upon opening statements from a panel at the 1989 AWP The following comments and short essays are based upon opening statements from a panel at the 1989 AWP Annual Conference in Philadelphia. It was the first AWP panel to address homosexual and bi-sexual literature and gay and lesbian writers. Our opening statements were followed by discussion among the panelists and by questions, suggestions, comments, and further evidence from the audience.
Read more...
Notes from a Community: Creative Writing Programs in Animation
Wayne Ude
In "Notes from a Cell: Creative Writing Programs in Isolation," Eve Shelnutt raises a number of troubling- ques tions. After fourteen years of teaching in creative writing programs, including terms as Director at Colorado State and now at Old Dominion, I've also seen much of what Shelnutt describes: narrowness in our notions of what a creative writing course may be, intellectual isolation in programs and journals, an arrogant self-satisfaction on the part of some creative writing faculty.
Read more...
Coalition of Writers' Organizations Mobilizes for Censorship Battle
D.W. Fenza
A unprecedented number of publishers and organizations for writers have organized as the Coalition of Writers' Organizations (COWO). Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and president of PEN American Center, is chair of the coalition. COWO formed this past November after the new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) cancelled and then reinstated a grant for an art exhibit that featured works about AIDS.
Read more...
How Publishers Perceive Gay Writers: Gay Content in Context
Samuel R. Delany
It's too easy to reduce the problem of "the gay writer" to the split between those gay writers (like myself) who, on the one hand, feel that all art is political one way or the other and that all they write is from a gay position—and, in my case, from a black and a male position as well—and those writers who, on the other hand, feel that all they write is fundamentally apolitical, even if it involves gay subjects; that they are just writers, who happen to be gay, or, indeed, black, or female, or male, or Jewish, or what-have-you.
Read more...
The Lesbian Writer & the General Reader
Honor Moore
When I think of community in my life as a writer, I think first of the strong community of women writers and feminist scholars which continues to inspire and support me. Like other lesbian women, I have begun to feel a new kinship with gay men, a sense of community I see represented on this panel and elsewhere-in the publication this fall of Joan Larkin and Carl Morse's anthology, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, and, most significantly, in the response of the women's community to AIDS.
Read more...