Archive for May, 2006
May 30th, 2006
Here I am at some nameless airport motel on the outskirts of Atlanta. I’m supposed to be flying to Tucson right now. Tomorrow night I’m speaking at the public library there, a Pride kickoff event. But my flight leaving VT was two frickin’ hours late. Even so, when we got to Atlanta it looked like I might still possibly make my connecting flight. I did one of those decathlons through the airport, running full tilt as I Read the rest of this entry »
May 26th, 2006
I’m having trouble getting YouTube to embed in my new blog, so if you want to hear this you’ll have to leave the site. It’s not a video, really, it’s the only way I could figure out how to record this phone message from my mom on the day I did the Entertainment Weekly photo shoot–catch the aside she makes to someone in the room as she’s hanging up.
May 26th, 2006
There’s a review of Fun Home in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, along with a fancy photo which necessitated my flying to NYC a couple weeks ago. I blogged about the whole experience back on May 12, but EW didn’t want me to mention it before the issue came out so I took the post down…but now I’ll put it back up. I’ll indent it because Read the rest of this entry »
May 24th, 2006
I’m trying to make a separate page to list links to reviews and interviews, but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet. In the meantime, the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis ran a nice joint review of Fun Home and artbabe Jessica Abel’s graphic novel La Perdida.
My friend, writer Susan Stinson, posted a lovely review of Fun Home in her LiveJournal. Yeah, okay, she’s my friend, but still.
And get this. Time Magazine included Fun Home in a list of “5 Memoirs That Are Worth Your Time,” which also included books by Julia Child, Roger Angell, Edmund White, and Howell Raines. Dang! I don’t know how long this link will last…and you have to click through to page two to see my book.
May 21st, 2006
I just got back from Washington, DC after a big weekend at BookExpo America, the gargantuan publishing industry convention. I was there to promote my new book Fun Home. Here I am Friday morning, just about to enter the vast and overwhelming trade floor.
And here I am in front of the booth for Bowker, a reference book publisher. 
My very first job out of college was as a temporary proofreader at Bowker. I wasn’t even proofreading words, but lists of numbers. It was awful. So I felt very smug that here I was 25 years later, no longer a temporary number checker, but an actual author.
I proceeded to the Houghton Mifflin booth, my publisher, where I signed a huge stack of books. They just gave them away to people, like breath mints! That made me a little nervous–how would we sell any if everyone had a copy already? But the Houghton people assured me that this is how these things are done. Later I signed another bunch of books in this big corral place where there are dozens of authors signing away while people line up in chutes to get a free book. 
Here’s my chute before they let the people in. And here I am signing. 
It was pretty wild.
But not nearly as wild as The Great Big International Drag King Show, which I went to later Friday night. These pictures suck, but it was the best I could do. 
This was an interesting sailor number. The finale involved a jolly roger flag being produced from a most surprising place.
This act was really impressive, with lots of period costumes and elaborate choreography. 
But these guys in their chaps performing Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy, were the real showstoppers.
The next day, I was on a panel called Pictures of a Life: Comics and the Memoir. My idol Harvey Pekar was on it too. He just guest-edited Best American Comics for Houghton Mifflin with Anne Elizabeth Moore. It’s a great anthology coming out in October. This is Harvey and me waiting to go to the airport.
May 19th, 2006
Tonight I went to the Lambda Book Awards in Washington, DC. Invasion of the Dykes was up for a humor award, but lost to a book called Don’t Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff. But I couldn’t feel too bad because Kate Clinton’s What the L didn’t win either. Then I got to present the fiction award with Andrew Holleran. This was very exciting. For some reason I never read Holleran’s classic Dancer from the Dance until a couple months ago. It was really mesmerizing, all about the glory days of New York in the seventies. And thus it was a particular thrill to meet him, even though I didn’t exactly meet him, we just showed up on the podium at the same time and read the names of the fiction finalists. But here’s a photo of half his head–he’s the guy with the white hair behind the other guy.
Here I am before the awards ceremony, on the right. Next to me is Abha Dawesar, whose novel Babyji tied with Helen Humphreys’ Wild Dogs in the lesbian fiction category. On the left is Kris Kleindienst, of Left Bank Books in St. Louis.
And here’s Kim Brinster and Janet of Oscar Wilde Books in NYC, flanking Holly Bemis, my publicist for Fun Home at Houghton Mifflin. Charles Flowers, the new head of the Lambda Literary Organization, really did a swell job putting the evening together. The ever gracious Katherine Forrest opened the ceremony–and her book Daughters of an Emerald Dusk won the sci-fi category. It was a pretty fun night.
May 18th, 2006
Sorry…I’m still figuring out this new system. Comments weren’t posting because there was some default thing checked that made people have to register, then it held comments for moderation. I’ve unchecked all that. Let’s see if it works. Thanks for your patience!
Oh, and sorry about the thing where you have to register for Flickr to see the large version. I don’t have time to figure that out now, but I’ll get to it.
May 17th, 2006
I had to take down a post about a magazine photo shoot (for Fun Home, my new book) that I did in NYC last week because the magazine doesn’t want anyone to know about it beforehand. Suffice it to say it was an odd experience indeed. Tom Cruise is on this publication’s latest cover.
Now that I’m a big celebrity, though, you should go bid on a disposable camera I shot for the Naked Eye Celebrity Camera Benefit, a fundraiser for MIX NYC, the NY Lesbian & Gay Experimental Film Festival. They asked a whole mess of people, from Laurie Anderson to Alan Cumming to Diane DiMassa to shoot a disposable camera with anything they wanted. Now they’re auctioning them off on eBay. But frankly, their website kinda sucks. You can’t link to the eBay auctions from it for some reason.
But I found my camera on eBay, here’s the link to it. I did a first-person shooter account of my day. Watch me pick up the disposable camera at the post office, drive into town, go to therapy, run errands, and walk my neighbor’s dog. Scintillating stuff. But I can’t guarantee anything turned out, so don’t blame me if you buy it and it’s just a bunch of blurry photos.
May 15th, 2006
Yeah, this is definitely more of a site overhaul than an upgrade. And there’s still a ton of stuff to do. And I’m not very familiar with this new interface yet. But I just wanted to make a quick test post, to see if I could. Uh…I can’t figure out how to insert a link. There’s a nice review of Fun Home on bitch phd.
