There's so much vitality now in the gay and lesbian market," says Carroll & Graf editor Don Weise. "There is definitely a gay/lesbian book community in place." Although not everyone involved in publishing books of interest to GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) readers is equally enthusiastic, optimism is clearly the norm. "We keep selling more and more books," says Felice Newman, copublisher of Cleis Books. "The industry has been through a lot of difficult times, a lot of reshuffling. But even though we read news reports that the number of readers in this country is shrinking because of the Internet and new forms of entertainment, our readership keeps growing. Part of the reason is that it has become easier and easier for gay and lesbian readers everywhere to find the books they want to read—through both better distribution and online sales."
Cleis is thus happily approaching its 25th anniversary, as is Alyson Books, where marketing manager Dan Cullinane says, "We've been having a really good year, thanks to the books we've been publishing."
Not only the established imprints express confidence in the future. Suspect Thoughts Press, in San Francisco, published its first book, Of the Flesh: Dangerous New Fiction, edited by the publisher, Greg Wharton, in 2001. "We've published 10 titles to date," he reports. "Seven total scheduled for this year, and next year's catalogue has 12 scheduled titles. We're definitely growing."
Among the newest houses specializing in lesbian-interest subjects is Bywater Books in Ann Arbor, Mich. Editor J.M. Redmann says, "Bywater is just starting up in the publishing world, with our first books out this fall. We plan to bring out four books next spring and four next fall, and to do 10—12 books for 2006. To encourage lesbian writers, we've created a fiction contest, with a top prize of $1,000 and publication by Bywater."
Although most of these books are original trade paperbacks, there are cloth editions, too—though price resistance is an issue. Kensington editorial director John Scognamiglio tells PW, "I'm scaling back in the hardcovers we're doing. Hardcover sales have been soft across the board, so we're doing more trade paper originals. Next year we're publishing only three authors in hardcover for the gay market: William Mann, Bart Yates and K.M. Soehnlein."
"We're in our fourth year," says Andrew McBeth, publisher at Green Candy Press in San Francis co, "and we're up to four to seven gay titles a year. One of the trends I've noticed is that despite all the gay guys you see on TV and despite all the stories about gay culture being popular, it's increasingly difficult to sell books, so one of our primary focuses is on more literate erotica in paperback, like The Sperm Engine by Stephen Greco."
Pointing out what is even more important than format, however, Scognamiglio identifies what has become a primary consideration in acquiring books for this market. "We've found that a novel with a gay protagonist will sell better than a book that contains exclusively gay characters," he says, "which is why we've done well with novels like The World of Normal Boys by Karl Soehnlein, The Trouble Boy by Tom Dolby and Leave Myself Behind by Bart Yates."
Similarly, Alyson's Cullinane notes, "Years ago, a gay plot was enough, but no longer. We have to publish interesting, fun, exciting books that people want to read. When you get past being gay, when you get past coming out, you have to move on to something else. We're like a gay Random House, we publish 50 books a year and do a little of everything—self-help books; mysteries geared toward women; vampire stories geared toward men; erotica; memoirs, such as Blue Days, Black Nights by Ron Nyswaner, the screenwriter for Philadelphia, and Midnight at the Palace by Pam Tent, one of the Cockettes. It's hardly news, but what we're doing is putting our own spin on things, putting the queer eye on a lot of different topics."
"When we first started publishing in the field in the late '80s and early '90s, there was a tremendous hunger for these books," says Jennifer Crewe, editorial director at Columbia University Press. "It was a very vibrant field, and publishers—ourselves included—probably reacted a little too enthusiastically. Today, the methods and interests of gay and lesbian studies are often folded into larger fields. Two titles that have done pretty well for us are Gay Fiction Speaks and its sequel, Hear Us Out: Conversations with Gay Novelists [both by Richard Canning], because they reach all sorts of people who read fiction. Mainstreaming is a good thing. We may publish a film book with a gay and lesbian angle, but we'll publish it primarily as a film book."
Raphael Kadushin, senior acquiring editor at University of Wisconsin Press, concurs. "We've had a very good spring with Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing [edited by Kadushin], A Passion to Preserve: Gay Men as Keepers of Culture by Will Fellows and Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition by Steven Greenberg. We don't have lead gay titles. Most of our books have two markets—the gay one and a Latino market or a travel market or a dance market. A book may actually sell better in the secondary market than in the gay one. For instance, the Greenberg book, about Jews and homosexuality, was supported more by the Jewish community than the gay market. Coming-out stories and disco stories have definitely run their course. We're not seeing as many AIDS memoirs any more. Gay writers are more and more coming to realize that it's not just about being gay any longer. A book has to be about the quality of the writing or something universal within the story."
At Bella Books, COO Linda Hill notes, "The romance genre continues to outsell general fiction, mystery and sci fi books by two or three times. I think, for us, our challenge over the next year is to develop new marketing and promotional strategies that allow us to stretch and grow as a publisher. That may mean any number of things, including publishing more lesbian-themed general fiction that would not fit under the traditional romance label, publishing lesbian-themed YA fiction and publishing some nonfiction." Hill reports that the house's new line of erotica, Bella After Dark, has taken off well.
Tackling More Topics
In fact, erotica is a subcategory within the gay and lesbian market that continues to win readers. Newman at Cleis says, "We do a fair amount of erotica to fill out our list. We started the Best Lesbian and Best Gay erotica in 1996, and those are really intelligent series with high literary standards that we edit very seriously to take them up a notch. We don't hide them behind gauzy covers, either. We said, 'Let's package them in an overtly erotic way.' They don't need to apologize for themselves."
"We're going to be trying different things here," says Kensington's Scognamiglio. "We're publishing African-American gay fiction with a book like Scrub Match by Bill Eisele. And next year we're doing some erotica titles. One is an anthology by a single author, Michael Thomas Ford, which will be the first book like that that we've published."
At Carroll & Graf, gay-oriented books have taken on a greater prominence with the presence of Don Weise, who has been an editor there for about a year. "When I worked at Cleis, my biggest book was Gore Vidal's essay collection [Sexually Speaking], and when I got here, I just started acquiring gay books," he says. "I buy what I want, and nothing is out of bounds, whether it's a book that's explicit or quiet." Weise has pursued a number of writers and Carroll & Graf's list can now boast such names as James Purdy, Edmund White, E. Lynn Harris, John Rechy, Charles Busch and Vestal McIntyre. Vestal McIntyre? "I'd read a piece he contributed to an anthology," says Weise, "and, with the help of a friend, I tracked him down to where he worked—as a waiter in New York's meat-packing district." McIntyre's January title, You Are Not the One, which is described asliterary comic writing, is now one of the publisher's lead titles and is being compared in-house to David Sedaris. "I like to introduce new writers," Weise continues, "which is why I'm doing Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, which contains stories selected by Ed White. I get tired of seeing the same gay writers over and over, and these emerging writers are not just in their 20s. Some are easily over 45. I'd also love to see more work by gay and lesbian writers of color."
At Haworth Press, where the Harrington Park Press imprint specializes in GLBT titles, publications director Bill Palmer says, "One of our publications is Journal of Homosexuality, and we started publishing related monographs 20 years ago. Nonfiction remains of great interest to us, but we've grown to reflect a broad diversity. We have titles all over the place—religion, relationships, sexuality—although today we pay more attention to lifestyle. Those are books that have a greater trade appeal. In the last four or five years we've developed a commitment to fiction. Our Alice Street imprint is for lesbian fiction, and Southern Tier is for gay male fiction. In the last few months, we've gotten into different gay and lesbian genres—horror, science fiction, mystery. We're establishing a reputation for fiction in part because larger mainstream publishers have been showing less interest in it. However, our editors try to get the fiction out of the gay ghetto. Not everyone lives in San Francisco and is 25 with a swimmer's build. We try to reflect the diversity of the population and its interests. In addition, we do our own printing and binding, so we can take risks. We don't have to sell tens of thousands of copies."
The diversity of the GLBT community leads to books that would have been unthinkable not so many years ago. For example, in November, Berkley will publish The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide by Arlene Istar Lev as a trade paperback. "It was our idea to do the book," says executive editor Tom Colgan, "because this is really an underserved market. The author is a counselor in the Albany area, and she includes a lot of first-person stories to illustrate a variety of issues. For example: Do we want to adopt or have our own child?" Lev also addresses such matters as family support systems, the role of religion and even the prospects of divorce.
Love—and Marriage?
At one time, divorce simply wouldn't apply to out and committed GLBT couples. But despite grave setbacks to the gay marriage movement—the statewide vote in Missouri banning the practice, the California Supreme Court nullification of the 4,000 weddings of gay couples earlier in the year, even President Bush's urgent advocacy for an amendment to the national Constitution—this is a subject that is not going away.
In the six months since PW first covered titles on gay marriage there has been an explosion of books, both pro and con. In fact, the subject has been simmering for quite some time—at least as far back as 1992, when Temple University Press published Lesbian and Gay Marriage by Suzanne Sherman. A sampling of well over a dozen books published before 2004 includes The Case for Same-Sex Marriage by William Eskridge Jr. (Free Press, 1996), Legally Wed: Same-Sex Marriage and the Constitution by Mark Strasser (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997); Same-Sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Prometheus Books, 1997); and Just Married (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002). That book's two authors, Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell, are Canadians who became the first gay couple to be granted that government's marriage certificate.
Books published earlier this year include Why You Should Give a Damn About Gay Marriage by Davina Kotulski (Alyson/Advocate Books); Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America by Jonathan Rauch (Times Books); and an updated edition of Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con: A Reader, edited by Andrew Sullivan (Vintage).
One of the many titles scheduled for release over the next several months is Chronicle's We Do: A Celebration of Gay and Lesbian Marriage, edited by Amy Rennert. Already this title, published last month, has become a poignant record of thwarted joy because of the California Supreme Court ruling. "We were all swept up in the huge enthusiasm in San Francisco," says editorial director Jay Schaefer. "This was a book that we just felt should be done. We didn't analyze trends in the marketplace. We did it as an instant book to capture an extraordinary moment in history, not just in California, but in New York and Oregon, too, and we did it in six weeks from inception to on sale."
This month Simon & Schuster published Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality and Gay People's Right to Marry by Evan Wolfson, who editor-at-large Rob Weisbach calls "one of the two architects of the same-sex marriage equality movement. He's fiercely articulate and incredibly humane, and the book is a real tool that arms us to talk about gay marriage in intelligent and practical ways without being polemical."
Also in August, Basic Books offers Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Marriage by George Chauncey. "George's Gay New York, which was published 10 years ago, is still selling well in trade paperback," says publisher Elizabeth McGuire. "He's been working on a sequel for years, so I was in the unusual position of asking him to interrupt that work in order to write a fast book on gay marriage. I cajoled him, told him the world needed him because no matter what position people might take, it's important to hear from a historian, not a politician or a polemicist." McGuire explains that she first interrupted Chauncey back in March, "around the time marriages began in Massachusetts and California. I persuaded him that he could write a short book in six weeks. He wrote a great book in eight weeks, and we produced it on a fast, magazine-like schedule."
Coming next month from Lexington Books is Same-Sex Marriage in the United States: Focus on the Facts by Sean Cahill. "This one is different from all the other books on the market," says editorial director Serena Leigh Krombach. "It's a factual guide to the issues at stake. For example, what are the rights that come from marriage that gay and lesbian couples are denied? It includes figures on gay and lesbian households from the 2000 census that have not been made available to a general market before. It's interesting that the places where same-sex households have grown the most from 1990 to 2000 are in the South and rural states. Sean knows what he's talking about because he's the director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute."
A wide range of views is assembled in Algonquin's October release, The M Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage, edited by Kathy Pories. "I was reading letters to the editor in the local paper and wondering why everyone gets so furious about the subject, claiming that gay marriage means the end of marriage as we know it," says Pories. "I didn't understand the connection and wanted to see what writers have to say about this. When there is a moment of great social change, we turn to writers." She turned to such gay and straight observers as Francine Prose, Dan Savage, David Leavitt and Jim Grimsley. "Not one essay is strident," says Pories. "Some are hilarious, some are exploratory. Many reflect on what marriage means in general."
David Moats, whose editorials on gay marriage for the Rutland (Vt.) Herald won him a Pulitzer Prize, published Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage with Harcourt last February. A new (and slightly retitled) edition is scheduled for next January, Civil Wars: The Battle for Gay Marriage. The Vermont state law allowing gay civil unions was passed in 2000, so Moats's book was in the works for several years. "It wasn't something we signed up because we knew what was going to happen in Massachusetts and California," says senior editor Andrea Schulz. "It just all happened at once, and David got tons of coverage. He's now written a substantial afterword to update what has happened to the people and the state of Vermont."
"There was some material on gay marriage in Richard Mohr's Gays/Justice: A Study of Ethics, Society, Law, which we published in 1989," says Crewe at Columbia University Press. "In fact, that was the first book we ever published in the field, and nobody could believe how well it did. In March, we'll publish Richard's revised and updated edition of his earlier book, A More Perfect Union. It will be The Long Arc of Justice: Lesbian and Gay Marriage, Rights and Equality."
Also scheduled for March is Broadway's Major Conflict: A Gay Life in the Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell Military by Jeffrey McGowan. "It's by a man who enlisted in the army and rose to the rank of major in 10 years," says deputy editorial director Stacy Creamer. "He saw combat and led men in the first Gulf War, but he was also still coming out to himself and coming to terms with what it meant to be gay in the military. He had a relationship with another guy in the military, but he realized that a private life is impossible there, and the other guy decided to get married. Jeff didn't want to be part of a sham marriage to a woman and, on the verge of leaving the military, he met another guy. They're now in a committed relationship. In fact, they were the first couple to get married in New Paltz, N.Y., which gives this book two cutting-edge issues: gays in the military and gay marriage."
Though publishers express enthusiasm and optimism for the many titles relating to gay marriage, booksellers are less than sanguine; see "Shelf Talkers," p. 24.
As is clear, the market for gay and lesbian books remains a lively one—broadening its subject base and its readership and clearly ready to be sparked by relevant social issues. As Kadushin from University of Wisconsin Press puts it, "There was conventional wisdom going around that after the large houses paid out big advances, without earning big sales, that the gay market is too small. It's really a matter of expectation. We don't expect to sell thousands and thousands of copies, but we know that there is a good market for serious gay books."
For a full, Web-exclusive list of forthcoming titles in this genre, click here»
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That site is www.romentics.com; you'll notice the plural in the name that the two Scotts (their joint byline) devised for the new imprint. (And you'll doubtless figure out that the "men" in the spelling gives a clue as to the books' target audience.) With the addition of Spare Parts and Nick of Time, the books now number four. Their target audience is primarily gay men, 20—45, says Pomfret, although straight women have also discovered the books. "If you look at straight romances, they vary a lot in how sexual they are," he remarks. "Our books are skewed toward the more sexual. In the past, we've written a fair amount of short erotica, and we definitely include some graphic sex scenes in the novels." Pomfret and Whittier have high expectations for Romentics, and have already found a place in the mainstream. Warner Books picked up rights for Hot Sauce, which it will publish in June 2005 (which is why that title is no longer offered online).
Fast forward 18 months, and the story of gay and lesbian bookstores appears very different. For starters, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop never closed at all, but instead was purchased by the Lambda Rising group, which has four stores in the Washington, D.C., area. Overall, the stress felt from large chains has eased. "The chains aren't trying to be competitive with us now," says Kent Fordyce, buyer for Lambda Rising. "They realized there's not so much money in it for them."
The package began in June, Gay Pride month, and continues through December. When guests who have purchased it check in, they receive gift baskets containing a custom music CD, what the hotel terms "intimacy kits" and a copy of the anthology. The collaboration continues with a series of readings from the book held at various W hotels this summer and fall, with additional copies available for purchase.
"Reaching that threshold was very important, and to have reached it before five years had elapsed really speaks to the market," says David Rosen, the club's editor-in-chief. Most members are contacted via direct mailings, and the club also advertises in such publications as The Advocate, Outand Curve, as well as local gay and lesbian newspapers.
