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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 1, 1990)
Invest in yourself in the 199Qs! Make certain your financial future is what you want it to be! Real estate can help you achieve prosperity in the new decade! Call me today! First OUTWRITE Conference highlights struggle and celebration of lesbian and gay writing___________ The dangers of silence outweigh the risks of speech suggested its agenda was colored with biases of race and class. Issues of writing are more than academic questions to her, she said; they or two days, they swarmed through the are about survival. “Poetry is the weapon I use rooms and corridors of the Cathedral to Hill Hotel in downtown San Francisco and did fight for the lives of my people.” Numerous speakers stressed that, for gay what writers do — talked, argued, shared and lesbian writers, complacency is both notes, told stories. More than 1,000 poets, unwise and impossible. In a discussion on novelists, playwrights, readers, publishers and “AIDS and the Responsibility of the Writer,” editors gathered at the first national gay and novelist Sarah Schulman disputed a vision of lesbian writers conference last month to the writer as a gifted recluse who need not examine the current boom in gay writing, its traffick in the world of politics. history and its prospects for the future. “Writing a book is not the same thing as That expansive topic led to a packed taking action,” she said, urging audience agenda of 29 panel discussions on subjects members to make their views known through ranging from practical matters of contracts demonstrations, letter-writing and other forms and agents to the political implications of of activism. revealing oneself in print. Pat Califia, the author of Macho Sluts, Throughout all the sessions, some common stresses that the gay and lesbian community themes surfaced: the urgency for gay and must not silence its own extreme voices, lesbian writers to tell and publish the truths of because any kind of censorship leaves “a gap their lives, and the forces — both inside and in the discourse.” outside the gay community — that threaten Nearly all of the panelists spoke of internal that honest speech. censorship, the struggle that happens in their In opening addresses, poets Judy Grahn minds and hearts as they try to tell truths and Alan Ginsberg talked about the political about their families, their communities and landscape in which gay and lesbian writers themselves. Again and again, the same reside. While glasnost has broadened the message came forth — that the dangers of boundaries of discourse in the Soviet Union, silence outweigh the risks of speech. Ginsberg noted, censorship continues here in Amid those risks, speakers also talked of the United States, in actions such as Sen. reasons to celebrate. They cited the lessee Helms’s attack on two federally-funded conference itself — the first-ever national photo exhibits with homoerotic content. gathering of gay and lesbian writers, which its When government acts to repress gay and organizers hope to make an annual event lesbian voices, Ginsberg said, writers must In addition, the current boom in gay and respond with frankness about their lives as lesbian publishing — from small, independent gay people and as human beings. “If we base our a/t and writing on the presses and, increasingly, larger publishing accuracy of our perceptions.. .we will have a houses — points to a broader sweep in place to stand on earth,” he said. American culture, said Michael Denneny, an Some of the most moving addresses came editor at St. Martin’s Press. from panelists who pointed to lines etched The emergence of gay and lesbian writing within the gay community — divisions of marks “a literary manifestation of a huge racism, class, culture and “political social transformation,” Denneny told the correctness” — that act to starve expression audience. To maintain that change, he said, rather than nurture it gay and lesbian writers must reach past their Essex Hemphill, a Philadelphia poet who obvious audiences, “expand the literary is black, brought the packed ballroom to a culture to the boys in the bars and the lesbians hush as he talked about the persistent racism next door.” he encounters among white gay men and Several panels aimed to look beyond the lesbians. present flourish to both the history and the “The gay community still operates from a future of gay and lesbian writing. A one-eyed, one-color perception that discussion of writing before Stonewall recognizes blond before black and never the included such pioneering authors as Ann two together,” Hemphill said, his voice Baimon, Samuel Steward and Del Martin; cracking with tears. another panel looked at the prospects for the The conference was sponsored by OUT/ emerging field of gay and lesbian studies in LOOK, the San Francisco-based gay and colleges and universities. lesbian quarterly. Although its organizers The conference brought together writers aimed to recognize the community’s diversity from opposite coasts, old and young, in with workshops on “Revisioning Race,” and dresses and leather, and reassured them that, “Chronic Illness, Disability and Writing,” the while they may suffer from a sense of audience was overwhelmingly white and the isolation, they are not alone. emphasis tended to rest on the “mainstream” "There is no such thing as innocent gay world of publishing and book reviews. and lesbian writing,” said George Stambolian, Chrystos, a Native American poet, noted editor of the Men on Men fiction anthologies. that a gay cab driver who brought her to the “What we write affects people’s lives.” hotel had not heard of the conference and B Y A MEMBER OF THE SEARS FINANCIAL NETWORK SUSAN J. 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