Michael Cunningham, Author

The Revolution Is Working

Although the world knows him as a writer who happens to be a gay man, Michael Cunningham claims no particular insight about this sector of the publishing market. "What I do look forward to," he says, "is the day when the notion of gay and lesbian books or a gay and lesbian section in a bookstore will seem as strange and old-fashioned as a section devoted to books by women or books by people of color. I'm more than ready for books to be on the shelves all together and for readers to be trusted to decide for themselves what books they want. For me and my friends, whether gay or straight, it's never a question whether or not a book is by a gay writer or if it's a story about gay people. We just read books."

This is, perhaps, one of the lessons that the overwhelming success of The Hours has taught him. "One of the really great experiences for me with that book was how broad the readership turned out to be," he tells PW. "I thought I'd lose a lot of my gay readers, but I was really happy to find that gay guys wanted to read a book that wasn't so directly about them. And most of the reviews didn't center on the sexuality of the book either, even though there were complicated implications about the women characters as lesbians."

The media seems very open to gay topics now, suggesting to Cunningham that "the revolution is working, however slowly. It has to be a good thing for human rights. The more gay people everyone sees, the better it is for everybody." In terms of publishing, he notes, "If a novel in which three women share romantic kisses can sell more than a million copies, that should make it easier for the next book. If you're lucky and things turn out well, your work will push slightly ahead of what's possible to publish and what's possible to sell.

"One of the most unambiguously good things that happened with The Hours," he adds, "was when someone would come up to me and say, 'I'm so happy about the success we're having,' meaning all of us who are not straight white guys."

Asked about current projects, Cunningham says, "I'm hard at work on another book, although it's been difficult to get anything done for the last year or two. This one isn't very gay. In fact, it's probably my least gay book, although there are gay sprites fluttering around its edges. It's not that I felt it was time to write my heterosexual novel. It's simply what interests me now."

John Scognamiglio, Editorial director, Kensington

Gay Protagonists and Erotica

Having established an unapologetically gay and lesbian publishing agenda, Kensington is not about to make any major changes, says editorial director John Scognamiglio. "In 2003, we're publishing 12 hardcovers and 22 trade paperback originals and reprints. Going forward, we'll be doing as many. We've been publishing most of the books in hardcover first and then in trade paper, but with the economy the way it is, hardcover sales across the board have been a little soft. Trade paperback sales seem to be growing, so I might experiment more with paper originals—unless an author already has a track record in hardcover."

Scognamiglio notes that as his publishing program progresses, "We learn what works. A novel with a gay protagonist performs better than a book that's about a couple of guys falling in love and is 100% gay. The World of Normal Boys by K.M. Soehnlein is such a book, and we have to go back to press every nine months or so. We were publishing quite a few gay romantic comedies, but probably too many, so I'm going to be cutting back. What I will be doing is testing the waters with erotica. The erotic romances we publish in our Brava line are doing really well, and I'm going to do some gay erotica too, but I want to be sure they are packaged in a tasteful, classy way."

Booksellers, Scognamiglio has found, are increasingly open to gay and lesbian books. "Barnes & Noble is terrific; so is Borders. Many accounts do special promotions with these titles, and we also offer co-op. A lot of our books are sold online through Amazon.com, A Different Light, TLA, Blue Door. There's also the Insightout Book Club. We have many sales opportunities." In fact, these are so numerous that Scognamiglio reports that the folding of some high-profile gay specialty stores has not had a particularly negative effect on sales. Publications such as the Advocate and Genre help get the word out on new books, when Kensington customarily places a couple of ads in June to promote upcoming summer reads. "We've also been talking of doing more online with sites like PlanetOut and Gay.com," he says, "as a way of reaching a younger audience."

A subgenre that seems not to sell terribly well is nonfiction geared to the gay and lesbian readership. "The books backlist well, but our sales people tell us that they can only get out 4,000 or 5,000 copies, and that's really not enough." Summing up, he says, "Most of what we're publishing this year is commercial escape fiction, but we will be looking for those novels that are not entirely gay—like Leave Myself Behind [last April's reprint by Bart Yates], which has been compared to Catcher in the Rye."

Ed Devereux, Owner, Unabridged Books

"Fun" Books Lead the Pack

Ed Devereux, owner of Unabridged Books, a 5,000-square-foot store in Chicago occupying two full floors, sees changes in the gay and lesbian section that makes up about 10% of his store. "In the old days, 10 years ago," he says, laughing, "gay men wrote gay fiction that was mainly gay, and now you have books in that section by anyone writing sort of gay fiction. A good example is Three Junes [Pantheon, 2002]. We have it in the gay section, but it's not what you would call exclusively gay. The Book of Salt [Houghton Mifflin, Apr.] was our bestselling book in the gay section for almost two months—we've sold almost 200 copies of the hardcover—but it's written by a straight woman. Augusten Burroughs's memoir Running with Scissors [St. Martin's, 2002] is another example—you don't have to be gay to like it, but that's part of the angle. That tends to be what you have these days, as opposed to what we used to call 'the Fire Island novels,' dealing with sex, drugs and parties."

Unabridged also runs a monthly gay book club that attracts 20 to 30 participants who discuss a selected book that has been sold at a 30% discount. But in addition to heady literary fare, Devereux reports that "fun" books are leading the gay and lesbian category at the moment. These include mysteries and humor, as well as Kensington titles like Michael Thomas Ford's just-published Last Summer, which Devereux describes as "Nothing too literary, almost like pulp fiction. They put a great cover on it and it sells like crazy."

On the demise of gay and lesbian bookstores due to assimilation—as diagnosed in the New York Times earlier this year—Devereux says, "It's the result of the mainstreaming of gay literature, but it's also the nature of bookselling in general. Twenty-two years ago when we started our store, there was a need for a gay bookstore in Chicago—there wasn't one in the whole city—but I liked all kinds of books, so we made a sort of store within a store. Fast forward 22 years and that seems to have been a smart idea, because now exclusively gay stores, like cookbook stores or mystery stores, are finding it's really, really tough to run a one-genre store."

Not that Devereux sees the large gay and lesbian section—recently expanded to include a subsection of books on transsexuality, such as How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002)—at Unabridged disappearing any time soon. He says, "I would envision we'll always have a gay section, although I think it will be more fluid and our idea of it will change."

Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, Publishers, Cleis Press

Out of the Ghetto

The recent success of TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, along with the changing public opinion on gay marriage, have inspired discussion of the "mainstreaming" of gay and lesbian culture. Are gay and lesbian books destined to be absorbed into the mainstream, eradicating the need for specialized publishers?

"Hell no," says Cleis co-publisher Frederique Delacoste. "If anything, these books address a wider audience than ever." Co-publisher Felice Newman adds, "I don't think that because something becomes mainstream it ceases to find a need. I can't think of a single example of an interest area that vanished because people knew more about it."

Newman continues, "There are always these articles that quote people declaring the death knell of gay publishing, but gay and lesbian publishing is certainly alive and we're doing very well. Economically, we have no debt and our sales are up."

Delacoste and Newman founded Cleis, which publishes works on gender and sexuality and other topics, as well as erotica such as Best Bondage Erotica (Sept.) and the Best Lesbian Erotica annuals, in 1980. (Wearing another hat, Newman wrote The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, which Cleis published in 1999.) Today they face the same industry trends that challenge other small presses. Newman says, "Chains get more and more unforgiving every year. The return rate is unbelievable. We should put toe shoes on the boxes, they're out one door and in the other so fast."

On the other hand, the press's small size is often an advantage. Explains Newman, "We're so lean and so quick that we can have an idea one day and have a book under contract the next day, announce it to the distributor the third day and have the book out six or eight months later."

The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian culture has, however, created a higher profile—and larger audience for books on the subject. Delacoste says, "Highsmith, a memoir by Marijane Meaker that chronicles her romance with Patricia Highsmith, has gotten more mainstream reviews than any book we've ever published and went back to press after only three weeks."

Cleis has also enjoyed widespread success with its reprints of five of Ann Bannon's 1950s lesbian pulp novels, the latest of which, Journey to a Woman, was published in May. "They were underground classics, but now they're used in courses all over the country," notes Delacoste.

In another form of crossover, writers who have published with major houses are now approaching Cleis, which published Gore Vidal's collection Sexually Speaking in 1999 and will offer Edmund White's Arts and Letters next year.

In short, it's an exhilarating time for gay and lesbian publishing. Says Delacoste, "We now have fantastic distribution, our chain buyers are more enlightened than ever, Amazon is reaching people who still feel at risk buying or ordering gay books from their local shops, review editors are calling us and we are getting our authors on [NPR's] Fresh Air. We are out of the ghetto—way out."

Ron Hanby, Bookazine Company

Gays Garden Too: Genres Expand

Describing his firm as the third largest book distributor in the U.S., Ron Hanby reports that his segment of Bookazine's business—he's director of sales for gay and lesbian studies—handles merchandise from about 200 enterprises, including producers of magazines, videos and books. "Probably 150 of these companies are related to books," he says. "I have a lot of single-title publishers, with quite a few self-published novels, such as The Tragedy of Miss Geneva Flowers by Joe Babcock [Closet Case Books]. One thing that's good about these is that many of the younger writers understand that they have to get out and promote their books themselves."

Numbered among the New Jersey—based distributor's bestselling clients in this field are Kensington and Alyson—and, for erotica, the Florida-based Starbooks. Hanby reports that the company's bookseller customer base is on the rise. "My stores range from those about the size of a moderate Barnes & Noble or Borders to a closet-sized store in the corner of a bar," he says. "The demise of some of the gay bookstores hasn't had a bad effect on our sales because, with the disappearance of each of these stores, two smaller ones spring up in the same region. I'm able to find between one and five new customers every month. My direct marketing is to the gay and lesbian stores or to gay-friendly stores that request the information." On the other hand, a number of the specialty stores choose to enhance their inventories with books other than those published strictly for gay and lesbian readers. "Many expand to cover other sections," explains Hanby. "Store managers realize that gays and lesbians have gardens. They cook. They're interested in interior decoration."

Hanby, however, mostly keeps close watch on new books directed at the core audience. "We sell both nationally and internationally, and we also import titles from France, Spain, Germany and other countries, so we're multi-lingual. I produce the Bookazine Hot Flash to update interested booksellers on the new gay titles that have just come in," he says. "Erotica sales are up. Flesh sells. Male-oriented, pre-AIDS fiction sells more because those novels can be much more erotic. What I call the single-hand novel is the driving force in a lot of places. There are still stores in the gay market who want to support only gay authors and books with only gay context."

The distributor's take on the state of gay and lesbian publishing is colored by the tenor of the market overall. "I can only be as positive as the rest of the business is," he says, reflecting the currently difficult environment for booksellers in general, "but it's not any harder or easier now to sell gay books to regular stores. Many remain afraid of what would happen if an under-age kid picked up one of the raunchier novels, but they are certainly much more aware of the products available."

Johnny Temple, Publisher, Akashic Books

Pushing "Dark and Edgy"

"We're a progressive, left-wing publisher, and I feel passionately about social justice," says Akashic Books publisher and editor-in-chief Johnny Temple. "It just so happens that there is a strong representation on our list of gay and lesbian authors. Gay and lesbian authors are attracted to us because we are not gay- and lesbian-identified—everyone wants to avoid being pigeonholed."

This is one among several paradoxes within the gay and lesbian publishing genre that Temple pinpoints. He rejects the popular hypothesis that demand for gay books remains constant, and that therefore readers will always track down and purchase these titles. That theory, he argues, fails to grasp the tremendous impact of handselling. "A Different Light was a wonderful venue for selling books and for book events," he notes, lamenting the demise of the once prominent gay bookstore in New York City. "The customer won't just buy the book somewhere else."

Furthermore, he perceives that the closing of gay bookstores has fostered greater "ghettoization" (his word) of gay and lesbian titles. "Barnes & Noble and Borders shelve the books together. I don't like to see a novel by a gay author shelved next to a gay cookbook." He claims that it is easier to place general than gay-identified fiction within most outlets. "You hear the innuendo, 'We don't do well with those types of books.' That is disturbing. That can be another strike against an author in a difficult marketplace."

Yet he is optimistic about the prospects for gay and lesbian publishing. "When I started the press in 1997, some of our initial gay and lesbian authors expressed a concern that their readership had too rigid a standard of political correctness. The authors felt there was a certain timidity about dark, edgy fiction, that there was too much emphasis on themes of redemption and integration. In recent years, I've found that's not the case. We're finding a bigger and bigger audience."

He cites David Sedaris as a paradigm of cultural change. "He is a gay author with appeal beyond his gay following. People who like Sedaris will love Headless," a story collection by Benjamin Weissman scheduled for February release. Headless is "curated" by gay novelist Dennis Cooper in Akashic's Little House on the Bowery series devoted to new voices in fiction.

Temple believes that a degree of mainstreaming has coincided with the rise of reality TV, including gay-themed programming. "Obviously all the viewership isn't gay," he observes. "It's very heartening to see that integration process happening. As the public is exposed to a greater diversity of the gay and lesbian experience at the pop-culture level, that will help to break down barriers. There has been an inevitable backlash, of course, but the bigots are losing ground and slipping culturally. In 20 years, the problems won't be as severe as they are now."

Charles Flowers, The Publishing Triangle

Gun-Shy After Mid-'90s Boom

At the recent Pink Ink queer book expo in New York City, Charles Flowers asked a woman why the mainstream publishing house she worked for wasn't exhibiting. Her reply: the publisher had no particular gay- or lesbian-themed books to promote.

For Flowers, co-chair of The Publishing Triangle (the gay and lesbian writers' organization that produced the expo), the woman missed the point. "Gays and lesbians buy all kinds of books, not just those with gay and lesbian content, but mainstream publishers don't seem to be thinking about that."

For example, most general travel guides today (such as Frommer's) contain a section for gay/lesbian readers. Yet only gay- and lesbian-specific guidebooks seem to be marketed toward the community, Flowers says. Similarly, Patricia Cornwell's thrillers aren't typically promoted among gays and lesbians, though the author is a lesbian and her books are popular with the community. "I would encourage publishers to not overlook this market, even if they don't have any specifically gay/lesbian titles," Flowers adds.

The big commercial houses are less interested today in gay/lesbian books as a genre than they are in developing a few gay or lesbian authors with crossover appeal, according to Flowers. That's a big contrast from what he calls the "gay publishing boom" of the mid '90s, when publishers were convinced just about any shade of pink could easily be turned in to green (dollars, that is).

While an editor at Doubleday from 1993 to 1996, Flowers saw "huge auctions and high expectations" for gay-themed books. "Everyone thought they were going to make lots of money. But it didn't happen, and then word got out that gay books didn't sell." The gay publishing boom and subsequent bust neatly parallels the dot-bomb phenomenon, Flowers points out. In both cases, irrational exuberance was followed by crushing disappointment, followed by a conservative, gun-shy period. Today, Flowers admits, mainstream publishers are sticking close to gay-themed titles they know will sell—particularly self-help and humor, as well as books from crossover stars such as E. Lynn Harris, David Sedaris and Dorothy Allison.

Meanwhile, small to midsized publishers (such as Alyson and Kensington) and university presses (particularly the University of Wisconsin and Duke) are thriving with more adventurous, experimental, quirky books for gay and lesbian readers.

The trouble is, smaller publishers don't have the advertising and marketing dollars to get their books noticed. Many independent gay and lesbian bookstores, which used to play a large role getting the word out on new books to the community, are barely hanging on today. New York, a city of 10 million people, nearly lost one of its two gay and lesbian bookstores, the venerable Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street, notes Flowers, until an 11th-hour intervention saved the store.

But all isn't lost. Gay and lesbian book clubs, such as Inside Out (in the Northeast), are gaining members and helping readers find new authors, Flowers notes. And so, Flowers is optimistic and has even started a literary journal, the first issue of which will appear this fall. Its title, Bloom, suggests hope for gay and lesbian literature, Flowers says—and a new beginning.

Dan Cullinane, Alyson Books

It's Evolution, Baby

Dan Cullinane, marketing manager of Alyson Books, prefers to get the bad news over with first (and not mention it again): "Gay and lesbian publishing, like all publishing, is suffering," he admits. "We're not isolated because we're different." This may be a noteworthy summer for book sales as a whole, he points out, but most unit-by-unit sales analyses are "pretty grim."

Cullinane is focusing on the near future of gay and lesbian publishing, not the sobering present. Addressing colleagues who he says dwell too much on the depressed market or on the closing of some gay bookstores, Cullinane offers his own perspective: "It's evolution, baby," he says. "To sit there and bitch about the things that have already happened is going to do nobody any good. I challenge all gay and lesbian publishers to get out there, to face the future, to figure out where gay people are going and to provide them with the body of literature that they truly want." If readers have stopped buying coming-out stories, he says, gay and lesbian publishers should stop trying to create more and more of them.

Alyson has several forthcoming titles that Cullinane says will speak directly to "the new generation of readers" whose tastes are different than readers who came before them. Bett Williams's The Wrestling Party (Dec.) is a nonfiction, autobiographical exploration of the seamy underside of erotic obsession. David Leddick's The Secret Lives of Married Men (Oct.) is a collection of interviews with 40 men ranging in age from 29 to 88 who, for one reason or another, chose to stay married to a woman while being cognizant of their homosexuality. And sex columnist and erotic writer Simon Sheppard's nonfiction Kinkorama (Dec.) delves into the underground extreme sex scene.

What do all these titles have in common? "We live in a world where people are fascinated with other people's lives." Look at reality TV, Cullinane says. "People are really interested in learning more about the way other people live without actually having to live there themselves." It's not exactly voyeurism, though, he says—"It's voyeurism mixed with a natural offshoot of the incredible amount of information that is available to people now." Given the overwhelming number of books out there, one expedient way of choosing among them is to head for the titles that seem the most exciting.

And what seems to be exciting readers, according to Cullinane, are other people. "The experience of being a gay or lesbian person is completely different now than it was in the '90s and completely different then than it was the '80s and it was different then from what it was in the '70s." Evolution is an entirely natural process, Cullinane says. "Our books need to reflect not just the history but the now."

A feature on gay and lesbian publishing for teen readers will appear in PW in the fall.