Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing

Raphael Kadushin is an award-winning food and travel writer whose work appears regularly in Bon Appetit, National Geographic Traveler, British Condé Nast Traveler, and the Condé Nast Web sites. His fiction and journalism has been widely anthologized in collections including Men on Men 5, Best Food Writing 2001 and 2008, and National Geographic’s Through the Lens, and he is the editor of the anthology Wonderlands. He is the senior acquisitions editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Contributors:

Bruce Benderson is the author of seven books, including The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, User, and Pretending to Say No. He has contributed articles to New York Times Magazine, Village Voice, nest, Paris Vogue, Blackbook, Libération, and other media. An accomplished translator and bilingual author, he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore for literature in 2004—and he has also taught creative writing, urban culture, and French literature at colleges throughout the United States. He divides his time between New York and Paris.

Brian Bouldrey is the author of the nonfiction books Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September, 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and The Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); three novels, The Genius of Desire (Ballantine), Love, the Magician (Harrington Park), and The Boom Economy (University of Wisconsin Press); and editor of several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award. He teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Northwestern University.

Clifford Chase is the author of a novel, Winkie (Grove Press, 2006), and The Hurry-Up Song: A Memoir of Losing My Brother (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). His stories and memoirs have appeared in McSweeney's, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, where he is at work on a second memoir.

Duncan Fallowell is a British writer of fiction and non-fiction. His novels are Satyrday (1986), The Underbelly (1987) and A History of Facelifting (2003). He has written the travel books To Noto (1989) and One Hot Summer in St Petersburg (1994) and the biography of a transsexual April Ashley's Odyssey (1982). Fallowell is also a cultural commentator and journalist who has specialized in interview-portraits of unusual or celebrated personalities. A collection of these has been published as 20th Century Characters (1994) and two further volumes are planned.

Mack Friedman is author of Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture and Setting the Lawn on Fire (UW Press) which won the Edmund White Award for best debut fiction in 2006. His essays have been featured at the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art and the Leslie-Lohman Gallery, and his performance art has been showcased at the Andy Warhol Museum. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Between Men, Wonderlands, and Barnstorm. . He has contributed to the magazines Out Traveler and $pread, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Philip Gambone is an award-winning essayist, journalist, and fiction writer living in Boston. He teaches writing at Harvard University. His previous work includes Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and a book of stories, The Language We Use Up Here.

Ty Geltmaker received his B.A. in history from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, his M.A. in history from New York University, and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. He has taught history and literature at California Institute of the Arts, the University of Southern California, and community colleges in Los Angeles and New York. Before working in academia, he was an editor at United Press International in New York and a journalist in Rome. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome for his short story collection The View from Stalin's Head, published by Random House in March of 2004. The View from Stalin's Head was also nominated for a Violet Quill Award.

            His next book, a novel titled Faith for Beginners, was published (also by Random House) in October 2005 and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.

            His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Poets and Writers, Details, Nerve, Out, The Forward, and Time Out New York.

            He has won a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, as well as first place in the David J. Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and has taught creative writing at Columbia University.

Trebor Healey is the author of the 2004 Ferro-Grumley and Violet Quill award-winning novel, Through It Came Bright Colors. He was born in San Francisco, raised in Seattle, and studied English and American Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. Over the years, he has published poetry in more than 50 books, reviews, journals, and zines. Healey's poem "Denny" was made into a hit single by the homocore punk band, Pansy Division. He lives in Los Angeles where he is working on his second novel, A Horse Named Sorrow.

Andrew Holleran is the author, most recently, of Grief: A Novel; a collection of stories, In September, the Light Changes; and of three highly-acclaimed novels: The Beauty of Men, Nights in Aruba, and the now classic Dancer from the Dance, which is widely regarded as one of the most important gay novels of the twentieth century. Edmund White describes Dancer from the Dance as having "accomplished for the 1970s what The Great Gatsby achieved for the 1920s . . . the glamorization of a decade and a culture." Of Holleran, Michael Dirda writes, "This man possesses the hypnotic voice of the Ancient Mariner—like the Wedding Guest, one cannot choose but hear. [He's] a master storyteller." Holleran received the Stonewall book award in 2007 for Grief: A Novel.

Raphael Kadushin is a senior acquisitions editor for the University of Wisconsin Press. His food and travel journalism appears widely. He is Contributing Editor at Bon Appetit, regular contributor to National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, British Condé Nast Traveler, the Condé Nast/CondéNet websites Epicurious and Concierge, and OutTraveler, and his travel journalism has appeared in National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Islands, Budget Traveler, Spanish Vogue, German Vanity Fair, Russian National Geographic, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Phoenix, etc as well as a range of regional publications (Wisconsin Trails, Isthmus, Minneapolis Star Tribune). His journalism and fiction has also appeared in a wide variety of anthologies including Men on Men 5 (Penguin), Best Food Writing 2001, National Geographic Society's best-selling Behind the Lens (he contributed the chapter on Europe), Mr. Wrong (Random House), etc. He is also the winner of the prestigious Bedford Pace award (in 2004, for best annual travel piece on England) and three top awards for international travel journalism from the National Association of Travel Writers and his first volume of Wonderlands was nominated for a Lammie award.

Michael Klein is an award-winning poet and author. His poetry collections 1990 and Poets for Life are winners of the Lambda Literary Book Award. His memoir, Track Conditions, also won the 1997 Lambda Literary Book Award for autobiography. He lives in New York City and teaches memoir writing in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Douglas A. Martin first published his novel, Outline of My Lover, which was nominated for the American Library Association's GLBT Book Award, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and named an international book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. It has been adapted in part by the Ballett Frankfurt for the production Kammer/Kammer. The author of two collections of poetry, Martin currently teaches at New School University in New York.

Dale Peck was born on Long Island, a graduate of Drew University, author of the novels Martin and John and The Law of Enclosures, he also co-wrote the screenplay for the latter. His latest novel is Now It's Time to Say Goodbye. His short fiction has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, London Review of Books, The NewRepublic, New York Times, and the Village Voice. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1995.

Martin Sherman has twice published collections of "Gay Plays" and many of his works focus on homosexuality. "Bent" was first performed in workshop at the O'Neill Theatre Centre in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1978, before premiering in London (with Ian McKellen in the lead) and on Broadway (with Richard Gere) in 1979. The play was the first to deal with the treatment of homosexuals by the Nazis during WWII. Set primarily in a concentration camp, it garnered controversy over two scenes in which the gay inmates achieve climax by words.

            The Philadelphia-born writer has had a number of stage successes in London (where he permanently settled in 1980). "A Madhouse in Goa" (1989) focused on the deceptive relationship between a young man and the woman he encounters on a Greek island. Vanessa Redgrave played Isadora Duncan in Sherman's "When She Danced" (1990–91) while Rupert Everett won praise for his turn as the object of the affection of a British Army officer in North Africa in "Some Sunny Day" (1996).

Edmund White is known as a novelist whose work has been widely praised by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov and Susan Sontag, but it is as a cultural critic that White has perhaps had his greatest influence. Urbane, knowing, sophisticated, he has chronicled gay life in the seventies through the nineties with wit and insight. He has become a grand arbiter of taste, though he has been criticized for the narrowness of that taste—especially after his 1992 anthology Gay Short Fiction contained no writing by men of color. Nevertheless, his 1980 travelogue States of Desire: Travels in Gay America remains a classic if insouciant (and now poignant) look at gay life at a particular cultural moment just before the onslaught of AIDS. His pioneering 1977 The Joy of Gay Sex: An Intimate Guide for Gay Men to the Pleasures of a Gay Life, written with Dr. Charles Silverstein, introduced millions, gay and straight and curious alike, to a brave new world of sexual practices and lifestyle.