Oh Yeah, My Secret Past ....


	Written during a very difficult summer of my life—added job responsibilities and stress, lousy love life, doubts about my abilities as a writer, and uncertainties about staying on in New York—I managed to piece together a string of short observations about being a deaf gay writer. After whittling down some 60 pages to a manageable 28 pages, I sent "Notes of a Deaf Gay Writer" off to CHRISTOPHER STREET. The rest, as one might say, is history.
	Even though Sasha Alyson was hearing and had no real contact with the deaf community, he had the rather revolutionary idea of looking for a deaf gay person to edit an anthology of deaf lesbian and gay writers. It so happened that he knew a friend who'd just read my CHRISTOPHER STREET piece. Sasha wrote to me and asked if I was interested in such a project. Although Sasha no longer runs Alyson Books, I will always be grateful to him for taking a huge chance on such an unknown. (Unfortunately this book has gone out of print.)
	Because I was hoping that George Stambolian, a major name in gay publishing, would help me find a home for my deaf gay novel MEN WITH THEIR HANDS, I gave him a copy of the novel. He ran across a chapter that he absolutely loved: "Ten Reasons Why Michael And Geoff Never Got It On." When George died, it was a real loss. He was one of the few editors who really believed in giving new writers like myself a chance.
	When Jill Jepson, the editor of NO WALLS OF STONE, asked to include my fiction along with a few of my poems, I was thrilled. At the time I thought my story "The Finer Things" would be part of my forthcoming deaf gay novel MEN WITH THEIR HANDS, it's been cut to streamline its narrative (it now reappears in SILENCE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD: ON ART & DEAFNESS—scroll below). I've been told that this story has provoked heated discussions in college classrooms at Gallaudet. I wonder why.
	Sasha asked me if I had anything to contribute to Tony Grima's anthology NOT THE ONLY ONE. I simply looked through MEN WITH THEIR HANDS and sent Tony an excerpt entitled "Ugly." Much to my amazement, he accepted it!
	Enough said.
	Kenny Fries and I met through a meeting sponsored by the Millay Colony of the Arts, so when he got an offer to edit this wonderful anthology STARING BACK, he asked to reprint my story from MEN ON MEN 4. As it turns out, many people from the disabled community have remarked on it (it was even dissected in a disabled gay magazine!) upon learning my name.
	I'd written this gay Ernest Hemingway parody eight years before, so it was a nice surprise when the editors took "A Rodeo Romance" for WILMA LOVES BETTY: AND OTHER HILARIOUS GAY AND LESBIAN PARODIES. An infamous sentence from the story ("His white boots were perfect as his teeth.") even merited an honorable mention in a CHRISTOPHER STREET's Bad Gay Writing Contest in 1991.
	SILENCE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD: ON ART & DEAFNESS was never meant to be published. Truly. I'd felt that many of my statements on art and deafness would be too audacious coming from someone like me. It was meant to be a personal book for me to reflect on as a deaf artist twenty to thirty years from now. But the more John Lee Clark of The Tactile Mind Press and I chatted online about the relationship between art and deafness, the more I felt he'd appreciate SILENCE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD. His offer to publish the manuscript was almost instantaneous. I was flabbergasted. (And now it's been popular enough to warrant a second, and revised, edition in the spring of 2005!)
	Some fourteen summers ago, when I worked on batch after batch of poems for ST. MICHAEL'S FALL, I wrote a batch of nature poems based on my childhood. Due to the focus and length of ST. MICHAEL'S FALL, I chose to take them out and regroup these nature poems as a separate book, now known as THIS WAY TO THE ACORNS: POEMS. It is true that if you work hard enough while waiting for the right opportunities, dreams can come true in the most unexpected ways.
	Two of my short stories ("How to Become a Backstabber" and "Depths of the River") appear in Tonya Stremlau's THE DEAF WAY II ANTHOLOGY: A LITERARY COLLECTION BY DEAF AND HARD-OF-HEARING WRITERS. I remain grateful for the incredible exposure this book has given me: It was given out to some 10,000 people who registered for Deaf Way II, so of course, I've gotten responses from all over to my work (as I'd listed my Web site in my bio).
	Years ago, an editor asked me to explore how I grew up as a deaf gay man in search of his identity through the cultural icons I'd been unwittingly exposed to. His proposed anthology fell through, but my resulting essay "It's All in the Eye" found a home some years later in QUEER CRIPS: DISABLED GAY MEN AND THEIR STORIES.
	If I were to look back on my career as a playwright, I'd point to SNOOTY as the first one that enabled me to discover the love of theater writing I never quite knew I had. The fact that it won first place in the New York Deaf Theater's Samuel Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition in 1990 was just icing on the cake. Of all my thirteen plays that's been performed so far, SNOOTY remains my best-known.
	Honestly, I never thought that anyone would be interested in reading a story about an overweight teenage girl who gets obsessed with the poet Sylvia Plath and decides to kill herself only to fail. Other than sharing my own fondness for Plath's work, I should say that the book is hardly autobiographical but a poetic exploration into the mindset of someone who gets drawn into the cult-like worship of someone who died young.
	My poem "I Am a Shoe" was inspired by a writing exercise in personifying an inanimate object during a poetry writing class that I attended once at the University of Pennsylvania. A few years later the poem was accepted for this anthology POETIC VOICES WITHOUT BORDERS, and I couldn't be happier!
	The book is indeed coming out in October 2007! More than 85 folks from all over the world has contributed amazing stories, interviews and poems to this 400-page anthology. It is now officially the second book in the entire world to focus on the Deaf GLBT community. (The first was my own EYES OF DESIRE: A DEAF GAY & LESBIAN READER, which was published in 1993.)
	No, this is not the cover of LANSEL. But it is my hope that after a major rewrite, the novel--currently a deaf soap opera that's been entertaining some four thousand fans of the free HANDTYPE WEEKLY E-ZINE--will find a permanent home at bookshelves everywhere! When? Stay tuned for the next episode!
	In addition to winning a first-place grant from the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation for Full-Length Fiction 2003, my deaf gay novel--possibly the first of its kind in the world--has had over 15 of its chapters excerpted in various literary journals over the past 15 years. Not only that, it won first place in the Project: QueerLit 2006 Contest. Suspect Thoughts Press will publish Men with Their Hands in January 2008.