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The Masks Drop for a Weekend
Film Fest First in the Granite State
The Masks Drop for a Weekend
by Paul Harris
On a snowy weekend in February last, a gay literary institution came to an end: “OutWrite,” organized by Boston’s Bromfield Street Education Foundation, held its final GLBTA writers’ conference. While its organization had, on occasion, been “patchy” (the Web site advertising the last conference is still up 18 months later!), it had undoubtedly filled a need, as the hundreds of people who made their way to Boston in such inclement weather proved.
The good news is that the vacuum left is being filled with the revamped “Behind Our Masks” conference, organized by the Lambda Literary Foundation, who up until now have perhaps been best known for the Lambda Literary Awards, or the Lammeys.
Behind Our Masks will take place in Philadelphia over the weekend beginning Friday, October 27, under the leadership of executive director Paul J. Willis.
Friday sees a day of Master Classes being led by some leading writers, such as Andrew Holleran (Dancer From The Dance), Felice Picano (Like People In History), Leslea Newman (Heather Has Two Mommies), and Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories). The sessions will be held at the William Way Community Center starting at 9am.
The conference proper gets under way on Saturday with a full schedule of sessions and panels featuring people such as Sarah Schulman (People In Trouble), Karla Jay (Tales of the Lavender Menace), Michael Thomas Ford (That’s Mr Faggot To You), Christian de la Huerta (Coming Out Spiritually), and Jameson Currier (Where The Rainbow Ends). The conference also includes the now obligatory Poetry Slam curated by master slammer Regie Cabico from New York City. Most of the conference events will be held at the Doubletree Hotel.
Literary conferences perform a number of roles, especially those aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender writers. If many writers live a life of isolation, for queer writers the situation is often worse. While GLBT writers living in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles may not lack access to queer writers groups’, colleagues in much of the rest of the country certainly do. Conferences such as Behind Our Masks allow them to meet with fellow writers laboring in the fields. Much of the value people obtain coming to these conferences is obtained simply in making contacts with fellow writers and those working in the publishing industry. Jameson Currier, Where The Rainbow Ends, a Lambda Award nominee and just re-released in paperback found his publisher, Hermann Lademann of Overlook Press, through the first Behind Our Masks conference. Even if you already have some contacts, says Currier, “sometimes it’s good to put a face to someone you’ve only had a phone or email connection with.”
“Conferences like OutWrite and Behind Our Masks bring together hundreds of people,” says Richard Schneider, publisher and editor of the Gay and Lesbian Review, “and create thousands of possible connections between writers and editors, publishers and advertisers, employers and prospects. Giving people a public venue such as this is especially important for a literary subculture that still operates, to some extent, in the shadows of the “mainstream” publishing world.” For many it is empowering simply being in the same space where everyone understands what it is to be a writer.
Michael Denneny, a senior editor at St. Martins once called “the dean of gay publishing,” has published some of the most important gay titles in the last quarter-century, and sees the conference as an opportunity to meet up with industry friends he rarely sees during the rest of the year. Other publishers use the opportunity to launch new titles with readings by their authors.
While earlier GLBT literary conferences tended to follow the academic model, they have changed over the years. “The panel discussions at OutWrite or Behind Our Masks tend to be rather free-form, even chaotic—and very uneven in quality,” says Schneider. “For this reason, I think there has been a gradual movement away from the academic model in favor of a trade convention model, in which the express purpose is to put people together who can collaborate on projects, buy and sell books, manuscripts, subscriptions, ad space, or whatever.”
Paul Harris is a New York-based freelance writer and award-winning playwright.He is the editor of The Queer Press Guide 2000 and the forthcoming Harris Guide to the Queer Press.
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