I’m super excited to be reading alongside one of my fave queer writers, Alvin Orloff, at the NYC release party for his new book Why Aren’t You Smiling?

Alvin wrote Gutter Boys, which my husband and I both adored (you can see him enjoying it back in 2005 in the picture, below).

If you’re in or near NYC on the night of June 6th, come on by!

Joe Westmoreland, Sam J. Miller, Stephen Boyer, and Ben Rosenberg join Alvin Orloff to celebrate the release his latest novel on Manic D Press.

Unnameable Books - Brooklyn NY - 7:30PM - June 6th - 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11238-3803.

The Facebook event is here.

The novel – called “endearingly funny” by K. M. Soehnlein, “hilariously funny” by Kevin Killian, and “swell” by Daniel Handler – follows a clueless queer teen’s ill-fated quests for spiritual enlightenment and social acceptance amidst the cultural no-man’s land of mid 1970s California.

Five vivacious and talented writers will be joining forces to celebrate the release of Alvin Orloff’s latest novel, Why Aren’t You Smiling? on Manic D Press. The story follows a clueless queer teen’s ill-fated quests for spiritual enlightenment and social acceptance amidst the cultural wasteland of mid 1970s California. Daniel Handler called the book “swell” and K.M. Soehnlein deemed it “endearingly funny.”

Alvin Orloff, a longtime San Francisco denizen, began writing in 1977, penning lyrics for his friend’s punk band, The Blowdryers. He spent the couple decades dabbling in performance art, activism, underground theater, low-level wage-slavery, and exotic dancing, all the while scribbling for now-forgotten ‘zines. In 1996 he co-authored The Unsinkable Bambi Lake, a transsexual showbiz memoir, following that with I Married an Earthling (2000) and Gutter Boys (2004). He will be reading from his latest, Why Aren’t You Smiling? (2011).

Stephen Boyer is the author of the chapbook GHOSTS and has been published in the anthology Cool Thing: Best New Gay Fiction, Madder Lover: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism, for the gallery 2nd Floor Projects, the Occupied Wall Street Journal as well as elsewhere. Boyer also put together the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. He’ll be reading from his novel PARASITE.

Joe Westmoreland has published a short story and essay in AlLuPiNiT, contributed from 2003-06 a column “Still Kickin’” to POZ Magazine, has been published in the anthologies Discontents, The New Fuck You, XXX Fruit, Best American Gay Fiction1996, Queer 13: Lesbian and Gay Writers Recall Seventh Grade, Latin Lovers: True Stories of Latin Men In Love, and The Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly. His novel, Tramps Like Us, was first published June 2001, and is available from the University of Wisconsin Press. He is currently working on his second novel. He will be reading a new story called “Falling Don.”

Ben Rosenberg is a multimedia designer and performer currently working in New York City. He is a part of queer electro punk collective, Lotus Eater Machine, and curates PHAN[T.A.Z.]MAGORIA!, an irregular series bringing together artists from across disciplines to create an interactive, multi-sensory experience.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His work has been published in places like The Minnesota Review, Arts & Letters, Fiction International, and lots more. He’s the co-editor of the critical anthology “Horror After 9/11,” which New York Magazine included in the “Brilliant/Lowbrow” quadrant of its famed Approval Matrix.

… I just sort of feel sorry for you.

“Our lives are radical acts that demand radical compassion to be understood.”

Seriously, go there now. Go there, and read it, and get your dungeon shook, and fall in love, because he’s an amazing writer, and subscribe to it in your RSS reader or whatever the kids are using these days, and then go about your business, probably work but maybe not, the economy is rough and a lot of people don’t have work, and then click back in a couple of hours because you can’t stop thinking about it, and then go through and read three years worth of awesome writing in one sitting, probably neglecting some important things in the process.

Or is that just me?

“I’d jerk off to them being my friends.”

Big kudos to the unfailingly-awesome Rumpus for reprinting and hyping Conner, which is what brought him to my attention, or anyway brought his blog to my attention because maybe I was already, uh, familiar with his other line of work, but the Rumpus reminded me he had a blog, when they promoted this incredibly brilliant thing that I don’t have any words to describe, besides incredibly and brilliant. And terrifying. And quivery-making. I don’t think quivery-making was a thing before, but it’s a thing now.

This is great writing, and it makes me quivery in a couple dozen ways. The sexy way, the about-to-cry way, the “tell-tale tingle down the spine” way that Vladimir Nabokov said was the sign of truly great art.

My review of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times, the crucial new book by James Tracy and Amy Sonnie, is in the new issue of the Indypendent.

“One of the things that’s so exciting about this book is that it comes at a time when the left has largely ceded the white working class to the right. Many of the activists profiled in this book believe that the failure of the white left to build power with working-class whites was a “fatal flaw” that could have changed the course of American history. The right has spent the past 30 years courting the rural working class on issues of individual rights, security and family values, all while building a base that has allowed them to shift the conversation in catastrophic ways. We make a mistake in believing that the Tea Party speaks for all poor whites — but that’s why we need Hillbilly Nationalists so badly. This book digs up a long and vibrant history of radical working-class resistance that we can still tap into if we understand it better.”