Hi all, here's to announce a really exciting event coming up next week. David Leavitt, the very well known American 'gay writer' (see below for why I've used the apostrophes!) and Mark Mitchell, his co-editor of 'The Penguin of Gay Short Stories' (1994, substantially revised 2003) and 'Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914' (Mitchell also independently edited The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing) are in India and they've agreed to have a discussion on gay writing at Crossword in Bombay. R.Raj Rao, the author of The Boyfriend, will be joining them to bring an Indian perspective. More details below, so all I'm going to say now is - THIS IS NOT AN EVENT TO MISS!!! Its going to make for a fascinating discussion and thanks to Crossword (a tip of the hat to R.Sriram, the manager, who readily agreed to doing this) we've got a great venue for it. Make sure you're there and make sure you forward this info to as many people as you can. For those who haven't read any of Leavitt and Mitchell's books, Crossword is trying to get as many copies as possible, particularly of The New Penguin of Gay Short Stories. BE THERE! Vikram David Leavitt, Mark Mitchell and R.Raj Rao discuss Gay Writing at Crossword (below the flyover, Kemps Corner, Mumbai) on Thursday, December 23rd Bios: David Leavitt: David Leavitt is the author of the short story collections Family Dancing (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize and the National Book Critics' Circle Award), A Place I've Never Been, Arkansas, and The Marble Quilt, as well as the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, While England Sleeps (Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize), The Page Turner, Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing and most recently, The Body of Jonah Boyd. In 2002, he published Florence, A Delicate Case as part of Bloomsbury's series "The Writer and the City." His Collected Stories was published this fall by Bloomsbury. He has just finished The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing, Mathematics, and the Origins of the Computer. With Mark Mitchell (see below) he has co-authored two books on travel writing and two anthologies. He teaches at the University of Florida. Mark Mitchell: Mark Mitchell is the author of Virtuosi: A Defence and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists, most recently, Vladimir de Pachmann: A Piano Virtuoso's Life and Art. The anthologies he has edited include The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing and, with David Leavitt, The Penguin of Gay Short Stories (1994, substantially revised 2003) and Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914. He and Leavitt have also edited E.M.Forster's Selected Stories for Penguin Classics. They have also co-authored two books on travel writing: Italian Pleasures and In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany. R.Raj Rao: R.Raj Rao was born in Bombay. He studied in India and the UK, and in 1996 attended the International Writing Programme, Iowa. He is the author of Slide Show (poems), One Day I Locked My Flat In Soul City (short stories), The Wisest Fool on Earth and Other Plays, Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography and, most recently The Boyfriend (a novel). He has also edited Ten Indian Writers in Interview and co- edited Image of India in the Indian Novel in English (1960-1980). A professor of English at the University of Pune, Rao is also one of India's leading gay-rights activists. Discussing Gay Writing Gay writing is a recent and rapidly growing field. There has long been writing on homosexual subjects, of course, but its easy to forget how hard it was, till quite recently, to tackle these openly and in any but the most superficial way. As David Leavitt reminds us in the extract below E.M.Forster could not have his gay writings published until after his death in 1970. The openness with which we can now deal with the subject is obviously an excellent change - yet its one that has brought its own problems in its wake. Who is a `gay writer'? Can't he or she just be a `writer' or is the adjective inescapable? Must a `gay writer' tackle gay subjects only and if so, are there constraints on how he or she can do that? Does a `gay writer' have to be a gay rights activist, or is he or she one by definition? Is `gay writing' a single definable school or should we recognise distinctions within it? As homosexuality comes out of the closet across the world, will gay writing spread? And will this new gay writing from the developing world differ from what has come from the developed world? David Leavitt, Mark Mitchell and R.Raj Rao will be discussing these questions at Crossword on November 23rd at 7.00 p.m. Make sure you don't miss it. >From the introduction by David Leavitt to The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories: On the problems of defining gay fiction: "What makes a `gay story' gay? This is a more complicated question than it may first sound. Traditionally anthologies of so-called gay fiction have collected stories by gay male writers writing about the lives of gay men. And yet, numerous gay male writers, from antiquity to the present day, have written fiction that at least explicitly has nothing to do with gay experience - even though it may exhibit a `gay sensibility' or `gay style' (two more problematic terms). Likewise, numerous heterosexual writers have written fiction that deals eloquently with male homosexuality. What about them? And what about fiction by lesbians? The majority of gay anthologists have no only left out work by heterosexual and lesbian writers, they haven't even considered the possibility that the exclusion might diminish the value of their work. So rigid an ideology is, to our way of thinking, counterproductive. That said, certain limits, must be agreed upon if an anthology is not to become so enormous as to defy practical publication." On the problems of being called a `gay writer': "Many people ask me if I consider myself a `gay writer'. My answer is that the question is irrelevant; as long as the culture I live in considers me a gay writer - and it considers every writer who tackles gay subject matter a gay writer - I'm stuck with the label. My sexual identity will subsume all other aspects of my identity - I might be a `gay Jewish writer,' never a `Jewish gay writer' - no matter how loudly I protest. The same people ask, with annoying frequency, why I always write about gay characters, which I don't. Well, I answer, if I were John Updike, would you ask `Mr.Updike, why do you always write about heterosexual characters?' They cough and get nervous. Because heterosexuality is the norm, writers have permission to explore its nuances without raising eyebrows. To write about gay characters, by contrast, is always, necessarily, to make some sort of `statement' about the fact of being gay. Stories in which a character's homosexuality is, as it were, `beside the point' confuse us: why bring this up? asks the writing teacher in our heads. Similarly reviewers complain about books in which too many characters are gay. (Does anyone complain about too many characters in Rabbit, Run being straight?) The problem is that this kind of thinking gets into a writer's head; we begin to believe that the sexuality of our characters really does define them. This may be the reason why Forster, at the height of his career, chose to give up publishing fiction. On the one hand he longed to write fiction about the homosexual experience. Wouldn't doing so, however, have diminished the illustrious author of Howards End and A Passage to India? Luckily for us, he continued writing; but his gay stories were not published until after his death." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Make a clean sweep of pop-up ads. Yahoo! Companion Toolbar. Now with Pop-Up Blocker. Get it for free! http://us.click.yahoo.com/L5YrjA/eSIIAA/yQLSAA/WfTolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Group Site: http://www.gaybombay.info ========================== NEW CLASSIFIEDS SECTION SEEKING FRIENDS? VISIT www.gaybombay.info click on classified section and type your message in the post section once the link opens This message was posted to the gay_bombay Yahoo! Group. Responses to messages (by clicking "Reply") will also be posted on the eGroup and sent to all members. 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