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.

Library audiences can be a random bunch. There are people who’ve come to hear the authors, people who’ve come to save on the heating bill and people who’ve come for a free cup of tea or possibly even a glass of wine. On that occasion, there were also a couple of lager lesbians who’d come to show us just how boorish they could be by talking and sniggering loudly throughout the event.

But that’s all beer under the bridge now. Since starting my own gay literary night Polari eighteen months ago (‘London’s peerless gay literary salon’, according to the Independent on Sunday, or ‘the world’s hottest gay literary salon’ if you listen to Boyz), the invitations have come thick and fast. First and foremost was the invitation to programme events at the London Literature Festival last July. It was the first time gay curators had been let loose at a major book festival, and we didn’t disappoint. We had female burlesque performers, male strippers and even a few authors on stage. Yes, we were the men who put the cock in the St Paul’s Pavilion! We even filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall with queens keen to discover more about our great gay literary tradition.

Since then, I’ve completed a new novel, and I have to say that I’ve never had more invitations to get out there and promote it. From the time ‘The Gay Divorcee’ is published in May to the end of this year’s London Literature Festival in July, I have more author’s events than I’ll probably find time for hot dinners. I’m reading in London, Brighton, Hereford and Kent, in bars, bookshops, libraries and festivals. I’m even taking part in a writer’s workshop - my first - in Devon in October.

Polari was borne out of my frustration at being marginalised. Now that it’s well established, I aim to use it to help champion unpublished gay authors and encourage publishers to see that there is an audience out there for this kind of work. Getting 150 people along each month to Polari, or 1300 into the Queen Elizabeth Hall is no mean feat. At present there is no gay publishing house in Britain. Together we can change that. © Paul Burston 2009.

Polari is the third Wed monthly at Freedom, 66 Wardour St, W1. 6.30-11pom. Free
 - March: Drew Gummerson, Adam Mars-Jones and John Joseph Biddy
 - April: Nick Alexander, Christopher Fowler and Aoife Mannix
 - May: Paul Burston, Trevor Medicine and Celine
www.myspace.com/polarigaysalon

'The Gay Divorcee' is published by LittleBrown on May 7th, 2009.
Read more about Paul Burston <here>
or here: www.paulburston.com

Support your local bookstore <here>

<<<Back