Bay Area Reporter- 10/05/06 (link to original article)

Bay Area LGBT writers appear in Litquake readings

by Kevin Davis

Members of the local queer writer’s community urge each other to pick up a pen or step onstage, read each other’s works, recommend each other to the city’s sprouting fringe publishers, and sustain each other’s many diverse readings year-round.

LGBTers at Litquake, the seven-years’-running celebration of the modern spoken word, with 350 writers, on October 6-14, are among this affirming community.

Big-bucks Manhattan book publishers may never pay attention to these open-mic rock stars, but that hasn’t dampened their let’s-put-on-a-show spirit or work for local imprints MacAdam/Cage, McSweeney’s, Suspect Thoughts and Manic D Presses.

This collaborative spirit is unique, said Andrew Sean Greer, 35, whose story “The Islanders” receives a staged reading at Intersection for the Arts on Tuesday, October 10.

“I’ve only found it in San Francisco,” said Greer. “Publishing isn’t here. There’s nothing to compete for. We don’t find out what people’s advances are, we go to each other’s readings. Everyone is in it together in this city.”

“Anyone can get up and read in the same community and setting and on the same footing as Kirk Read,” said Charlie Anders, who is hosting Writers with Drinks for the fifth time at Lit Crawl on Saturday, October 14, when Valencia Street gets saturated with thousands of readers basking in a spectrum of genres. “That’s really empowering. You just show up, and people welcome you. We’re all struggling to be heard, to get better and be part of something.”

“I really feel like there’s room for everybody,” said Tara Jepsen, 33, a gardener, who will read from her soon-to-be-published Like a Dog at Barely Published Writers, Sunday, October 8 at the Hemlock Tavern. “I don’t feel competitive that way. People genuinely helped me. Seeing my friends achieving and doing things motivates me to try more,” sa

id Jepsen, who was urged by writer and Fellow Sister Spit alumni Michelle Tea to read her e-mails on stage. “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be doing that, too.”

“When you’re in the world of freaks, doing things their own way because they don’t know any other, usually it’s something so fascinating and original,” said Jepsen, whose K’Vetch queer open mic night is 10 years old.

The writer community is not a “cut-throat environment” or a place “to meet your rivals,” said K.M. Soehnlein, who will read an original short story at Natoma Alley’s Varnish Gallery on October 12, on the assigned theme, Secrets Told and Untold .

“Karl [Soehnlein], after he read my book, he wrote me the most wonderful letter,” said Katia Noyes, 48, author of Crashing America and former dance critic for the SF Sentinel. “Charlie [Anders], months before my book came out, invited me to Writers with Drinks and shared information about the writing scene.”

Noyes reads with other Suspect Thoughts writers at Gender/Queer: Beyond the Binary at the Elbo Room, from her forthcoming novel about a revolutionary movement in a Belgrade-type urban capital under dictatorship.

Slut power

Simon Sheppard was “leading a checkered bohemian life” until a “midlife career moment” when he read Patrick Califia’s Macho Sluts. “I just needed something to goose me,” he said, calling the book “a pivotal moment, one that changed my life.”

Sheppard will read from his story “I Was JT LeRoy’s Fuckboy” at Litquake. Sheppard’s Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica will be published next year.

Most of these ink-stained and carpal tunnel-strained storytellers do not eat or pay the rent by pen alone.

“It would be nice if you made a decent living by it,” said Sheppard, 58, who, though he has published erotic stories in 200 books, is on his partner’s health plan, lives in a rent-controlled space, and works at the Warfield Theater for minimum wage. Contributors to annual Best Of anthologies rarely make over $300 per submission, or receive royalties, he said.

“I have made money off writing, but it’s a very much pieced-together freelance life,” said Soehnlein. “It’s a struggle. Anyone dedicating their life to writing will tell you the same thing. But, it’s worth noting, I’d much rather be piecing together my life this way.”

Discipline in writing practice and structure vary wildly.

“You have to do it because it’s your passion and your means of expression,” said Soehnlein, 40, a USF creative writing instructor whose second book, You Can Say You Knew Me When, comes out in paperback next month. “You can’t do it expecting to transform your life or be loved by strangers. There has to be a lot of fortitude, a pretty strong sense of self to do it.”

Greer writes three pages daily in his “crummy” basement office near his Lower Haight home shared with boyfriend, David Ross, a computer trainer.

Alvin Orloff, 45, who only gained prolific steam in his 30s, needed “the maturity and wisdom of age,” and can only write when the spirit moves him.

“I might get drunk at nine at night and have to write for the next five hours, or go five days without writing,” said Orloff, earning his SFSU Creative Writing MFA while working his Dog Eared Books job. He has written two titles for Manic D Press.

Lit Crawl also includes Susie Bright’s The Anxiety Chronicles panel discussion on how fear shapes politics, sex and language.

View www.Litquake.org for event dates, venues, and times.