![]() ![]() ![]() Listening to him say this in such a hallowed hall had a profound impact. The brief speech ended, of course, by acknowledging how far the publishing industry has come both on the page and on stage. In his wry acceptance speech-preceded by an introduction from filmmaker John Waters who called White a “literary top”-White discussed the struggle of having tried to publish gay fiction pre-Stonewall and even many decades later how his work was rejected for being both too explicit and too subtle, stating that the “familiar is more threatening than the exotic” and how it “only” took him half a century to go from one of the most maligned writers in American letters to being honored. LeVar Burton, the man who’d helped me and many others my age become serious readers, was hosting, and that year another living legend was set to receive a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: author Edmund White. Between bites of buffet-table bread, I sat there staggered that I had somehow ended up in queer literary heaven. I couldn’t look around the room without seeing a writer I admired: Dorothy Allison, Rigoberto González, Sarah Broom, Jericho Brown. The experience felt grand it was a red-carpeted “benefit dinner” on Wall Street. It was my first-and so far, only-time there. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Ī few years ago, I found myself a bit tipsy at the National Book Award ceremony. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |