AAA A
I’m a gay author with a major publisher (LittleBrown) and a sizable backlist (eight books to date). I’ve been the recipient of a Stonewall Award, and made the Independent’s Pink List of the 101 most influential gay people in Britain three times over. I’ve even been on the telly. You might think therefore that I would have little trouble getting invited to book festivals and literary events to promote my work.
But you’d be wrong. See, the books I write are what can best be described as ‘gay’, and for some strange reason, the attitude of most festival programmers seems to be, ‘Oh, we had one of those last year’ (the ‘one of those’ usually refers to someone like Alan Hollinghurst or Jeanette Winterson)
Until recently, my book-promoting activities have mainly been restricted to Gay Pride events and LGBT History Month events. Regrets, I’ve had a few. There was the time VG Lee and I travelled for hours to Leicester Gay Pride only to discover that our event hadn’t even been advertised. We ended up reading to an audience of four people, two of whom had only come in out of the rain to eat their chips. 
Then there was the time Rupert Smith and I travelled up to Manchester for a reading at Queer Up North. It’s a great festival, is Queer Up North. The only problem was, our event was starting at 6.30pm, whereas the website said it was starting at 8pm. And it wasn’t in central Manchester as we’d been led to believe, but at a library in Bolton.
<more>
|
Nick Alexander and Daniel Allen Cox chat about the weather, language, and paying for sex.
Nick: Hello Daniel, how are you today and what have you been up to?
Daniel: I declined all Friday night invitations so I could wake up at 7 a.m. this morning and catch up on my e-mails. Today I plan to reconnect with old friends and business partners, and start a new column. I’m looking through my office window, disappointed that the older woman who usually tends her weeds isn’t there. The snow has pushed her inside, I guess.
Nick: Snow! Yuck! I used to think it was pretty, but two winters up in the Alps and I'm starting to hate the stuff. My place has been surrounded since November and I have dug my car out at least ten times... At least it's melting now. Where are you living and how bad are the winters there?
Daniel: I live in Montreal, a city built around Mount Royal, an igneous intrusion (harmless volcano) . Right now it’s covered with snow, bare, rakish trees and an Eiffel Tower sort of crucifix, but the snow is quite nice. The winters have been getting pushed ahead by a few days for as long as I can remember. Now, Decembers are warm, and snow only really starts falling after the new year.
Nick: I have been living in Nice for years... so the move to the mountains has been quite brutal. The winters in Nice are like english summers - so I have gone from whizzing around on a motorbike to digging the car out of the snow. I'm not sure I prefer the new arrangement at all.
Daniel: You are painting a picture for me, from Ernest Hemingway’s "A Moveable Feast": "We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful." What hogwash! Surely there is an underworld in Nice. Where are the rent boys, and how much do they cost?
<more> |
New York's Oscar Wilde
Bookshop to close!
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop – New York’s last remaining specialist gay and
lesbian bookstore closes on the 8th
of March.
Some blame the credit crunch, others say that increased integration has
rendered specialist bookstores, even specialist gay sections superfluous.
BIGfib blames consumer laziness and explains why
we still need specialised booksellers as much as ever.
So the Oscar Wilde Bookshop has thrown in the towel, after 41 years!
A
similar fate threatened London’s beloved Gay’s The Word almost exactly a
year ago. It was saved by the tireless efforts of the owners and a wide
ranging mobilisation of clients and authors, all determined that it should
survive.
Increasingly I am hearing that specialist gay stores, or even the simple
gay shelf in existing bookstores, no longer have reason to be. Now that we
are accepted, the argument goes, we have no need for a special niche. But despite what some may think (wish for?) integration isn’t about our
vanishing into thin air. It’s about being visible and being accepted.
A gay teenager who wants to find a novel that describes people like
himself, a life he may end up living, that discusses the specific problems
and opportunities he is likely to face, can look until he’s blue in the
face on the bookshelves of Tesco or Asda, but he will not find what he is
looking for.
In a traditional bookstore he has a little more chance, but without either
a gay section or a gay author list what are his chances? He could ask of
course, but to a nervous youngster, what does the lack of any provision for
his specific needs say about the attitude he is likely to face from the
booksellers? <more> |
AA A
I bet that right now, you're not listening to Duran Duran's "Ordinary world" in your Walkman, which means you won’t understand a word
I’ve written. You suck, but that’s beside the point. Since you probably
stole this notebook from me, I’ve already begun hunting you down,
and there are two things you should know in case I attack you tiger-style from behind before you finish reading it:
1—I didn’t do it to him on purpose.
B—You’re never more than ten feet away from a guy who’ll pay
you to shuck your pants.
Test it out.
The guy standing behind you in line at the supermarket, look at
what he’s buying. They don’t go together. See how he cruises you like
a piece of fruit, and how disappointed he is when you don’t give him
the signal. He dumps the taco shells and ice cream in the magazine
rack, and leaves empty-handed.
Customer two. The dude reading beside you on the subway,
nevermind. He’s missed the whole last chapter, picturing your jeans
in a funky pile at the foot of his bed. He knows he doesn’t have to
pay, but he wants to. He says nothing, waiting for the signal, reading
your hands.
Do it. Hook your thumb in your belt loop more often, and you’ll see
what I mean. Even if you do it unprofessionally, they’ll still swarm.
***
Jaeven Marshall, twenty-two.
I don’t know what these guys see in me. They can easily buy a better trick just down the block.
My posture is atrocious, and my fingers are stained. I’m a mess,
but they still come after me. My knees are like dowels come loose that
I can’t hammer back in. Sometimes they pay extra to lick the webs
between my toes. <more> |
S
Sleep Evades me.
The wind is hurling itself, invisible battalions crashing against the shutters. I imagine that the subsonic thuds are the lines they
show on weather maps, smashing to smithereens, cartoon style, on the
walls of the building, hopelessly, pointlessly.
Tom sleeps through it all, dreaming it would seem – his mouth is working
constantly, his tongue clicks occasionally against the roof of his mouth.
I can feel the warmth of his body or maybe something more than just
warmth – his aura? – jumping across the gap where our thighs nearly meet.
From the waist up our bodies curve away into separateness.
Another subsonic wave collides with the bedroom window. I can feel the air
inside the room move too. There must be a gap somewhere.
I roll onto my side and study Tom’s features; he looks beautiful. He’s no
slouch when awake, but asleep he looks younger – peaceful, neutral somehow.
|
I know he’s still asleep precisely because our bodies aren’t touching. When
awake Tom always positions himself so that there is at least one point of
contact – unless we’re at war. In winter he hugs me like a koala, hot and
comforting against the cold extremities of the bed, while in summer it can be
just a heel, or a shin; the simple contact of a finger, a toe, his dick… but
whatever the season, there’s always a spot where our bodies meet. And then sleep
takes him and he rolls away.
I sigh and smile at the contented look on his face and wonder if he is truly
happy. He’s so hard to read when awake – he gives so little away. And then I roll
onto my back and wonder what the day will bring.
I think of a song by Holcombe Waller – my current musical obsession. “Hey
oh, hey oh, hey oh; who controls your emotions?”
For Tom will wake up soon and the nature of the day will begin to
crystallise, like some complex mathematical result of putting his star sign or
biorhythms, or whatever controls our emotions, together with mine. Or maybe
the day already exists somewhere over the horizon, and we just have to sit and
watch as the weather of the day – sunshine or storms, cold shoulders or popcorn – slides invisibly into place. <more>
Reprinted with permission from Nick Alexander's new novel,
Better Than Easy (BIGfib Books, March 2009
|
