HomoQuotable - Larry Kramer

"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe." - Larry Kramer, in an interview with Salon.

HomoQuotable - Larry Kramer

"Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague. Please know that no country in the world, including this one, especially this one, has ever called it a plague, or dealt with it as a plague. Please know that there is no cure. Please know that after all this time the amount of money being spent to find a cure is still miniscule, still almost invisible, still impossible to locate in any national health budget, and still totally uncoordinated.

"Please know that here in America case numbers continue to rise in every category. In much of the rest of the world — Russia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa — the numbers of the infected and the dying are so grotesquely high they are rarely acknowledged. Please know that all efforts at prevention and educations continue their unending record of abject failure. Please know that there is no one in charge of this plague. This is a war for which there is no general and for which there has never been a general. How can you win a war with no one in charge?" - Larry Kramer, from a letter handed to patrons attending the revival of his landmark play, The Normal Heart.

Read Kramer's entire letter.

Frothy Mix On His Campaign Slogan

Frothy Mix's campaign slogan, "Let America be America again," may have been lifted from a poem by noted gay author Langston Hughes. Oopsie!

AUSTRALIA: Armistead Maupin & Husband Denied Restroom For "Real Men'

Last week famed author Armistead Maupin and his husband Christopher Turner were treated shamefully by the bartender at an Alice Springs, Australia restaurant.

According to Mr Maupin, they were told to take a seat, after which Mr Maupin's husband Chris asked if he could use a rest room. "The guy said, sorry, we don't have one in here but you can go across the street to the public facility." Mr Maupin, who had used the toilet in Bojangles the day before, said he pointed in the direction of the toilet and said 'what's that over there?' "[The barman] gave me a very pointed look and said that's reserved for 'real men'," said Mr Maupin. "Neither one of us could quite believe he'd said it, and he actually repeated it, [he said] 'see the sign on the door, it says gents, it's for real men.'" Mr Maupin and Mr Turner immediately left the establishment and made an official complaint at the Visitor Information Centre. "I think it was less than 24 hours later that we got an email from Peter Griggs in the tourism office saying he'd spoken to the proprieter of the business who was just as shocked as we were and that the man had extended his apologies."

Last night Maupin commented on his Facebook page: "Just to be clear: There are no apologies necessary from either Alice Springs or Australia. I've never felt more welcomed by a country. This was a lone gunman, and we just handed him his balls on a platter. It's over."

This Thursday In New York City

Swag Tuesday

Courtesy of the publisher, today's Swag Tuesday prize is Mary Ann In Autumn, the latest in legendary gay author Armistead Maupin's Tales Of The City series. Mary Ann In Autumn is now available online and at booksellers nationwide.

More than twenty years have passed since Mary Ann left her husband and child in San Francisco for the allure of a television career in New York. Now, a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, newly wed and happily ensconced with a much younger husband. Grateful for the temporary refuge their cottage offers, Mary Ann, now at the unnerving age of fifty-seven, licks her wounds and begins to take stock of her mistakes. With the help of the Internet, Facebook especially, and a few old friends, she begins to reengage with life, only to confront fresh terrors when – out the virtual blue – her speckled past comes back to haunt her in an unexpected way. Caught in her orbit is a cast of intriguing players whose stories play out against her own: her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michael’s transgender gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson and her wife D’orothea; and the legendary Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann’s former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane.

I read Mary Ann In Autumn during (appropriately enough) my flight to San Francisco last month and can report that it's every bit as delightful as the previous books in the series. As always, I most identified with Mouse (raised in Orlando, escaped to San Francisco, a single memorable night as a go-go boy) and that parallel continues in the new book with Mouse's middle-aged bear identity. Spooky!

We have three copies of Mary Ann In Autumn to give away. Enter to win by commenting on this post and please remember to leave your email address in the text of your comment. Entries close at midnight on Thursday, west coast time. Publicists: If you'd like to take part in Swag Tuesday on JMG, please email me.

RELATED: Armistead Maupin is currently making appearances to support Mary Ann In Autumn throughout the U.S., Britain, and Australia. On December 9th, he'll be reading at the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Hit the link for locations near you.

Swag Tuesday

Courtesy of the author, today's Swag Tuesday prize is an autographed copy of Boy Does World, the new memoir from Metro Weekly's editor and publisher, Sean Bugg. Boy Does World is now available online and at booksellers.

It's a big world. Somebody's gotta do it. As a kid in rural Kentucky, Sean Bugg dreamed of the day he would make it to the big city. When he got there, the small town boy found himself in a big-town world of sex, love, parties, fashion disasters, some more sex, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and--finally--true love. "Sean was fearlessly funny in a fearful era clouded by AIDS, and Boy Does World is a wonderful chance to enjoy a retro romp into that past. It's also an affirming look at some happy endings--the hard-won, worth-fighting-for future of gay equality and domestic bliss." -- Hank Stuever, author of Tinsel and Off Ramp. "Sean's story of sexual discovery is one that many gay men will relate to, but it's written in a funny, insightful way that few other writers could match." -- Craig Seymour, author of All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C.

We have two autographed copies of Boy Does World to give away. Enter to win by commenting on this post and please remember to leave your email address in the text of your comment. Entries close at midnight on Thursday, west coast time. Publicists: If you'd like to take part in Swag Tuesday on JMG, please email me.

Alyson Books Goes Digital-Only

Long-running LGBT publishing house Alyson Books is restructuring as an e-books only company following its acquisition by Here Media several years ago. Many of Alyson's authors have long-overdue books, including Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who went very public with his complaints last month.

John Knoebel, v-p of consumer marketing at Here Media, has been named interim publisher until a new digital publisher can be found. Knoebel said he doesn't expect Alyson to begin publishing e-books for nine to 12 months. "We want to develop a strategy that makes sense," he said, adding that Here Media would like to have the new publisher on board and involved with creating the new business model. The recruitment of a digital publisher "could take some time," Knoebel said. Over the next few days Alyson will be reaching out to the authors it has under contract and whose books they have not published to give them the option of getting their rights back or moving ahead with Alyson's digital program. "We know authors are working in different circumstances," Knoebel said. "We hope some will stick with us." Alyson has about 24 authors under contract whose books have not yet been released. Alyson has not published new print books since fall 2009.

HomoQuotable - Camille Paglia

"Despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era.

"Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over." - Camille Paglia, writing for the Sunday Times Magazine.

TRAILER: Howl

Has there been an Allen Ginsberg biopic yet?

Dan Savage Launches iPhone App

Dan Savage has launched his own iPhone application. Description: "It's packed with pretty much everything that he does- his columns from the past 5 years (searchable by category...hello Adult Babies!) a question/answer of the day, all his podcasts, a collection of videos, and more." Get it at the link.