Why We're Here

I'm going to be writing on this new blog regularly. It's my furry mug in the snapshot under "About Me." If you're at all curious about who I am, let me just say I was, in a manner of speaking, the first member to sign on with this new Book Club. How could I not?

I've been reading Gay & Lesbian literature since roughly the time that we collectively decided that we, as a people, did indeed have a literature, a culture and a voice. I wasn't present when our Movement was born. I wasn't reading One Magazine or The Ladder back in the day. I am of the generation that came of age after, and because of, the work of the pioneers who wrote and marched and organized and bled and died to make Stonewall. I kissed Harry Hay at the 1987 March on Washington, but that was as close as I ever got to calling him Comrade.

My generation inherited not only the struggle and Pride of our ancestors, we also received from the them, and from those who they first empowered, an astonishing legacy of art, poetry, fiction, biography and autobiography, history, philosophy, journalism, rhetoric, theater and eventually, even film, music, television and dance. But first, there was The Word.

I am a true believer in the power. Without The Word, we would still be defined by hatred, ignorance, pity, silence; in short, by our enemies. It was only when we claimed for ourselves our self-definition, when we made of ourselves a community and movement, and when we finally spoke Our Truth -- and wrote it -- that we became who we are.

The legacy of our struggle, our history, of our Fathers & Mothers, is first and foremost in The Word. It is our literature, more than any other single achievement, that taught us to stand up, that expressed our individuality and our community, and that still preserves all that made us. It is still our literature that can speak most eloquantly to our friends. And we are losing, every day, our connection to that literature.

Books go out of print, go unpublished, go unreviewed. Authors central to our experience are marginalized, are not taught in our schools, not known to our new generations, go unread. Every day the literary culture that made us and that continues to speak for and to us, disappears.

The Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club exists to celebrate our literature, not to mourn it's passing. We come together to read and discuss, to revel in and reread, to learn from and teach what is best in us, what we are in our own words.

Now, I've briefly introduced the host of our Club, Nick DiMartino. Let me just review. He is the man who selects our book each month, who leads the discussion, welcomes our readers, sets out the chairs, works with our wonderful host, Dunshee House, and works himself to exhaustion to make this Book Club happen. He is a force. He is a joy. He is a champion of all that is good in literature. He is my friend. Without Nick? No Book Club. So when he asked me to join him, how could I say no? Why I would I? Why would anyone?

And in an astonishingly short time, he has made a place in Seattle for all of us to come together to read and talk and laugh and celebrate. And he has made a stand. Join us.

Trust me, you've just got to meet the guy, and everybody else in this with us. These are some great people! Young and old, men and women, and good time will be had by all.