Elisa - My reviews and Ramblings

Author and editor Adam Mars-Jones has written short stories as well as longer fiction on gay themes, including AIDS. (Picture: Adam Mars-Jones, credit Sarah Lee)

Born in 1954 into an upper-middle class legal family in London--his father was a judge, his mother a lawyer--Mars-Jones was educated at Westminster School and Cambridge University. He is now film critic of the London Independent.

Mars-Jones won considerable praise for his first book, Lantern Lectures (1981), a set of three novellas written in a post-modern mode. "Hoosh-Mi" is a grotesque story of the British Queen's contracting rabies from a pet corgi's bite, and continuing to fulfill royal functions under increasingly adverse conditions. Told by various narrators, it combines dark humor with sharp analysis of royalty's contemporary futility.

A similar mixture of fiction and documentary is also evident in "Bathpool Park," which takes Harry Hawkes's The Capture of the Black Panther, about a notorious murderer, as a starting point to show a criminal's construction of a crime. The story goes on to show the police, the press, and the judiciary--social institutions specifically designed to find out and publicly narrate the truth--failing to discover it.

Lantern Lecture's technical qualities were noted in a review by Galen Strawson, who cited the "emotionally deadpanned style of delivery, the technical impassivity of the allusive, cloisonné construction."

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Citation Information
Author: Normand, Lawrence
Entry Title: Mars-Jones, Adam
General Editor: Claude J. Summers
Publication Name: glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture
Publication Date: 2002
Date Last Updated November 12, 2002
Web Address www.glbtq.com/literature/marsjones_a.html
Publisher glbtq, Inc.
1130 West Adams
Chicago, IL 60607
Today's Date October 26, 2012
Encyclopedia Copyright: © 2002-2006, glbtq, Inc.
Entry Copyright © 1995, 2002 New England Publishing Associates

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Alexander Wilson (25 May 1953 — 26 October 1993) was a writer, teacher, landscape designer, and community activist. (Photo: AIDS Memorial, Cawthra Park)

Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Wilson grew up in Oakland, California. In 1977, he moved to Canada, where he lived and worked in Toronto, Ontario.

Wilson advocated restoring indigenous plant species to the urban landscape, thereby promoting urban biodiversity and reconnecting urban dwellers with the natural history of the place in which they live. He believed that combining ecological restoration and community gardening could be a way to nurture and improve not only urban ecosystems, but also social and economic relations. In his book, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991), he dealt with the ways in which culture informs and constructs our understanding of “nature”, and he examined the colonization and appropriation of nature by the city (particularly via the automobile).

Wilson established the Garrison Creek Planting Company with artist Stephen Andrews (his life partner) and horticulturist Kim Delaney. He also designed the landscaping for the AIDS Memorial, Cawthra Park, itself designed by Patrick Fahn. Following Wilson's death from AIDS-related causes, his own memorial plaque was added to the others in the park.

On an urban lot near his house Wilson created a reclaimed garden that, after his death, friends tried to buy and preserve. Though they were unsuccessful in that project they did find another downtown lot on which a garden was created and named in his memory, the Alex Wilson Community Garden, which opened in June 1998 at 552 Richmond Street West in Toronto.


Alex Wilson Community Garden

A plaque in the park includes a quoted passage from The Culture of Nature:

"We must build landscapes that heal and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Wilson_(writer)

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Melvin Dixon (May 29, 1950 - October 26, 1992), widely praised as a novelist, translator andliterary critic, published poetry that portrayed both his interior explorations and world travels. Born in Stamford,Connecticut on May 29, 1950, Dixon was graduated from Wesleyan University in 1971 in American Studies, and earned an MA in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1975 from Boston University.

Both in his published and unpublished writings, Dixon wrote openly about his homosexuality. James Baldwin's influence is seen in Dixon's two novels, "Trouble the Water" (1989, winner of the Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction) and "Vanishing Rooms" (1991). In the latter, Dixon wrote about homophobia and racism in New York City's Greenwich Village. His first book of poems, "Change of Territory" (1983) spoke of the historic northward migration of African Americans from the southernUnited States and the enforced journeys of African slavery. His final volume of poems, "Love's Instruments" (1995) published after his death from an AIDS-related illness in 1992, serves as a tribute to other gay men withthis disease. As an active spokesman for gay communities and issues, Dixon integrated the complexities of gay identity and lifestyle into his work while communicating what it meant to be a black man.

As a writer, Dixon embraced both scholarship and creativity. He wrote poems, short stories, novels, essays,critical studies, and translations from French. Seeking his literary heritage, he traveled to the Caribbean, Africa and Europe, researching the Haitian poet and novelist Jacques Roumain, Leopold Senghor, the poet and former president of Senegal, and Richard Wright in Paris. His translations include Roumain's poems, Genevieve Fabre's "Drumbeats, Mass, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre" (1983), and "The Collected Poetry by Leopold Sedar Senghor" (1991). He also wrote a critical study of African-American literature entitled "Ride Out the Wilderness" (1987).


Melvin Dixon & Richard Horovitz AIDS quilt
Melvin Dixon, widely praised as a novelist, translator andliterary critic, published poetry that portrayed both his interior explorations and world travels. Dixon was graduated from Wesleyan University, and earned an MA in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1975 from Boston University. Richard Allen Horovitz was the executive director of the Panos Institute, a nonprofit organization on environmental issues in Washington. Dixon died of AIDS, a year after his long-term partner Richard Horovitz did.

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Source: http://www.nypl.org/archives/3613

Melvin Dixon was born May 29, 1950 in Stamford, Connecticut to parents originally from the Carolinas. A Professor of English at Queens College from 1980 to 1992, Dixon was a poet, translator, and novelist whose books include the poetry collection Change of Territory (1983), Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (1987), and The Collected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor (1990), a translation of poetry by the one-time president of Senegal. His first novel, 1989‘s Trouble the Water, combines Dixon‘s urban upbringing with his family‘s southern roots for a tale featuring his talent for creating the gritty, layered realities and surreal lyricism that would be explored further in Vanishing Rooms.
While the protagonist of the first novel is a married teacher at a celebrated New England college, Jesse Durand in Vanishing Rooms is a young dancer sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with his white lover. The subject of gay biracial relationships was controversial not only during the novel‘s 1970s setting but also at the time of Vanishing Room‘s publication in 1991, and still to the present day. I admit my own hesitation at approaching the subject; disapproval and misunderstanding remain in the minds of many individuals gay and straight. Maybe part of why I read Melvin Dixon‘s book was because at the time I needed some form of validation for my desires, to see an interracial couple explored with the same depth of imagination and complexity as lovers in other works of literature.
(...)
Dixon died of AIDS-related complications in 1992 at age 42 (one year after the publication of Vanishing Rooms, the same year Dixon‘s partner Richard Allen Horovitz passed away; the novel is dedicated to him). As with James Baldwin‘s death, Dixon‘s absence leaves an empty space for other brave writers to fill and undertake the still divisive topics brought to light by Dixon and his literary ancestors. That Vanishing Rooms was brought back into print seems to indicate not only that its significance to gay and African American literature has been recognized but also that Jesses and Metros of the present and future will still have this novel as part of their literary heritage, perhaps helping them move beyond the traps of racism and homophobia to a place where they can see each other in unfiltered light.
In his college senior year, Jesse performs a spooky solo to Strange Fruit at the spring dance concert. The next day someone asks him for the meaning of the dance.

Then he asked if I wasn‘t really saying something about people ostracized from society, outcast, martyred, some fruit unpicked and rotting in its sugar. I didn‘t know what to say. I promised to think it over. And I promised myself that I‘d keep on dancing no matter how hesitant the applause, how rooted the tree, how strange the fruit.

--Ian Rafael Titus for The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

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More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices


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Robb Forman Dew is an American author. She has described writing as "a strange absorption about this alternate world and the way it mixes with your real life."

Born in Mount Vernon, Ohio, October 26, 1946, the daughter of Oliver Duane Forman and Helen Ransom Forman, Dew grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where her father set up his medical practice. She also spent a great deal of her childhood in Gambier, Ohio, where she visited and occasionally lived with her maternal grandparents, Robb Reavill and John Crowe Ransom. During that time she found herself surrounded by a wide range of poets and writers connected with the Kenyon Review, or who were friends, colleagues, or former students of her grandfather's. Her godfather was Robert Penn Warren, who was a close friend of the family's.

She attended Louisiana State University but did not graduate. In 1968, she married Charles B. Dew. The couple moved to Columbia, Missouri, in 1969, where Charles taught history at the University of Missouri at Columbia. They have two sons, Charles Stephen, born in 1971, and John Forman, born in 1973. The family moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1977, where Charles B. Dew is now the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College.

Dew's first novel, Dale Loves Sophie to Death, was published in 1981 and won the 1982 National Book Award in category First Novel. She has taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, has received a Guggenheim fellowship, and was awarded an honorary degree by Kenyon College in 2007. Her latest novel is Being Polite to Hitler.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb_Forman_Dew

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Love Lessons By Heidi Cullinan. Rafflecopter Giveaway:
1 ecopy of LOVE LESSONS
1 Car Charm
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Please follow the link to partecipate in the giveaway: http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/share-code/YjRjMDAwMWQ0YTk5ZGQyZmI1YmFhOThlNDc4OWIwOjgy/

Blurb: Love doesn't come with a syllabus.

Kelly Davidson has waited what seems like forever to graduate high school and get out of his small-minded, small town. But when he arrives at Hope University, he quickly realizes finding his Prince Charming isn't so easy. Everyone here is already out. In fact, Kelly could be the only virgin on campus.

Worst of all, he’s landed the charming, handsome, gay campus Casanova as a roommate, whose bed might as well be equipped with a revolving door.

Walter Lucas doesn't believe in storybook love. Everyone is better off having as much fun as possible with as many people as possible…except his shy, sad little sack of a roommate is seriously screwing up his world view.

As Walter sets out to lure Kelly out of his shell, staying just friends is harder than he anticipated. He discovers love is a crash course in determination. To make the grade, he’ll have to finally show up for class…and overcome his own private fear that love was never meant to last.

Warning: This story contains lingering glances, milder than usual sexual content for this author, and a steamy dance-floor kiss. Story has no dairy or egg content, but may contain almonds.




Available to purchase at




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About the Author: Heidi Cullinan has always loved a good love story, provided it has a happy ending. She enjoys writing across many genres but loves above all to write happy, romantic endings for LGBT characters because there just aren't enough of those stories out there. When Heidi isn't writing, she enjoys cooking, reading, knitting, listening to music, and watching television with her husband and ten-year-old daughter. Heidi also volunteers frequently for her state's LGBT rights group, One Iowa, and is proud to be from the first midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage.

You can stalk, I mean find Heidi here:



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As in the previous book I read by Kindle Alexander, you can tell this author knows romance and romance rules. This is a cinderfella meets prince charming story, family values, happily ever after and all. There is basically everything you want in your romance, the teasing, the courting, the showing off how proud you are of your beloved (with red carpet walk and all). There is also the sex, but not so much or too much to distract you from the love story: these two men enjoy each other bodies, but it’s not for the sex they are together (even if Gage quite enjoys Trent’s body).

I have also found quite true the issue Trent is having finding the right partner to share his already made family of two children under 6 years old. True there are gay couples wanting to marry and having children, but when the family is already there, and it’s not yours, I believe it can be more difficult to find a partner.

The main story was the love story between Gage and Trent; there was a mystery/thriller subplot concerning Gage that will have a connection with Trent, sincerely, I think that part was a distraction from the love story, and, ab absurbo, the one that was more disconnected from the realm of possibility: when I say this is a perfect romance, I’m implying this is stuff from the dreamland, but actually not impossible in real life; you can fall in love with prince charming, and prince charming can fall in love with you, true, there aren’t many of them around, but if you are lucky enough, you can find yours; but all the political/thriller/adventure plot, involving secret services and very important people, well, that was something out of the romance dreamland and maybe it clashes with the pink cloud where I was lulled by the reading of the love story.

Amazon: The Current Between Us
Amazon Kindle: The Current Between Us
Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher: Kindle Alexander LLC (June 18, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0989117367
ISBN-13: 978-0989117364

Updates: http://www.goodreads.com/user/updates_rss/2156728?key=011e4dd0a1ff993d8c2322e691d6229ed9bbf74b



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