The Letter Q
Page 18
Martin Moran lives in New York City where he works as an actor and a writer. He has appeared in many Broadway and Off-Broadway plays including Titanic, Cabaret, Bells Are Ringing, and Floyd Collins. He won a 2004 OBIE Award for his one-man play, The Tricky Part.
Eileen Myles was born in Boston and moved to New York in 1974. For her collection of essays, The Importance of Being Iceland, she received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant. Sorry, Tree is her most recent book of poems, and her Inferno (a poet’s novel) is available from OR Books.
Michael Nava is the author of the Henry Rios novels and winner of five Lambda Literary Awards and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in LGBT literature.
Jasika Nicole is primarily an actress, but she is perpetually trying to squeeze in as much drawing and writing in her spare time as her work schedule allows. Nicole has two web comics, High Yella Magic and Closetalkers, which can be found on her website, jasikanicole.com.
Eric Orner is a cartoonist whose works revolve around LGBT issues. He is best known for his acclaimed creation, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, which was made into a film in 2005. He has published comic strips and illustrations in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New Republic.
Erik Orrantia is a middle school teacher by day and a writer by night. His first published book, Normal Miguel, was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Romance in 2010. He is also the author of The Equinox Convergence, and his most recent title, Taxi Rojo.
Julie Anne Peters has been writing books for young readers for the last 20+ years. Her YA novel Luna was a National Book Award finalist and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Her other books about gender queer youth include Keeping You a Secret; Far from Xanadu; Between Mom and Jo; grl2grl: Short Fictions; Rage: A Love Story; and She Loves You, She Loves You Not … Her most recent title, published in 2010, is By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead.
Christopher Rice published four New York Times bestselling novels by the age of thirty and served as a contributing columnist to the Advocate magazine for five years. He received a Lambda Literary Award for his second novel, The Snow Garden. His criticism and editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, and the Daily Beast.
Paul Rudnick’s plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world. These include Valhalla, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, I Hate Hamlet, and Jeffrey, for which he won an OBIE, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and the John Gassner Playwriting Award. His novels are Social Disease and I’ll Take It. His screenplays include Addams Family Values, the screen adaptation of Jeffrey, and In & Out.
Rakesh Satyal has been published in a variety of anthologies, including the Lambda Award–winning The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers and the second volume of the Fresh Men series, which featured an introduction by Andrew Holleran. He is the author of Blue Boy.
Brian Selznick is a Caldecott-winning author and illustrator of children’s books, including The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Wonderstruck.
Carter Sickels is the author of the novel The Evening Hour. After spending nearly a decade in New York, Carter left the city to earn a master’s degree in folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Susan Stinson won the Lambda Literary Foundation Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize for Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, Martha Moody, and Venus of Chalk. She recently completed Spider in a Tree, a novel about eighteenth-century Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards.
Lucy Thurber is the author of eleven plays, including Where We’re Born, Scarcity, and Monstrosity. She has been produced by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater and The Atlantic Theater company, among others. She has been commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, Yale Rep, and The Contemporary American Theater Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P.
A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts, Tony Valenzuela is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, gay men’s health, and sexuality. He is currently the Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Maurice Vellekoop is the author/illustrator of four books of his own work with Drawn and Quarterly and Green Candy Press. His work has been shown numerous times at the Reactor Gallery in Toronto, the Mayor Gallery in London, and in a traveling group show called “New Pop” that stopped at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.
Linda Villarosa runs the journalism program at the City College of New York in Harlem. Her novel Passing for Black was published in 2008.
Marc Wolf is a writer and performer living in New York City. His plays Another American: Asking and Telling and The Road Home: Re-Membering America have been produced in New York and across the country. He is a recipient of the OBIE Award, GLAAD Award, and two NEA Awards, among others. He stars in the film Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, adapted from Another American.
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of a number of award-winning books for children and young adults including Miracle’s Boys, The Other Side, Show Way, Feathers, Locomotion, and Beneath a Meth Moon. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Bil Wright is the author of Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy, When the Black Girl Sings (a Junior Library Guild selection), and Sunday You Learn How to Box, which was a New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age. An associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Bil Wright lives in New York City.
Doug Wright is a playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2004 for his play, I Am My Own Wife.
Each one of us deserves a chance to dream for the future, no matter who we love or how we express our gender. The Trevor Project is here for young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning people to help whenever you or a friend might need to talk to someone. Through our lifesaving programs and information, we work every day to help make the future better for all LGBTQ youth.
The Trevor Project operates the 24-hour Trevor Lifeline, and also TrevorChat online messaging service, both connecting young LGBTQ people to open and accepting counselors, free of charge. Plus, there is www.TrevorSpace.org, where thousands of young LGBTQ people from all over the world can connect in a safe and accepting social space. Trevor is also on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, connecting young people with positive messages every day.
If you or someone you care about feels depressed or is considering taking their own life, please call The Trevor Lifeline at: 866-488-7386. The call is free and confidential.
Visit www.TheTrevorProject.org to learn more.
Text copyright © 2012 by Sarah Moon. All rights reserved. Published by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, THE LANTERN LOGO, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
Excerpt from Equal Affections, copyright © 1989 by David Leavitt. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The letter Q : queer writers’ notes to their younger selves / edited by Sarah Moon ; with contributing editor James Lecesne. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-545-39932-6 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gays—Identity. 2. Adolescence. 3. Coming out (Sexual orientation) 4. Self-acceptance. I. Moon, Sarah, 1982- II. Lecesne, James.
HQ76.25.L495 2012
306.76’6—dc23
2011041181
Cover design by Chip Kidd
First edition, May 2012
e-ISBN 978-0-545-50220-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the ex
press written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.