Guess what?
Lots of great news for you—and for me, too.
I just finished interviewing award-winning Colombian-born writer and scholar Jaime Manrique for the post that goes up on July 15th, parallel to the publication of Ambiente in Miami. Jaime and I discussed his books Eminent Maricones, Twilight at the Equator and Latin Moon in Manhattan, which I read in succession for the interview.
The readers for the next PANIC! reading on Wednesday, July 29th are Kari Hoerchler, Jason Baumann, Chadwick Moore and Lee Houck. They’ll be reading stories and poetry with “heat” themes, so bring sun-block, cold water, and cold cream. Looking forward…I’ve also been asked to curate two readings for the NYC Public Library in September and will have news on those soon.
As I was researching literary journals to submit stories to, I learned of Ganymede and its editor John Stahle. Now, for those of you who forgot your basic Greek mythology, Ganymede was the beautiful boy who Zeus fell in love with (yes, even Zeus was bisexual). And not just that, my darlings, they’re documented as having been lovers (close your eyes now).
So this post’s look into literary matters…
It was one of those discoveries that made my Spanish blood race through my veins—a new publication of gay male art and literature that champions—and with edgy splendor—our creative desire, history, and future. Ganymede is a paperback compendium published four times a year and is the creation of John Stahle, a New York-based writer, editor, and designer. I came across his refreshing new publication while researching new and exciting publishing channels.
Ganymede features artists from New York and around the world, and in its first four issues has spotlighted dazzling Latino talent—from the haunting photographs of Israel Márquez (an industrial design student from Jalisco, Mexico) to Marco Diaz’s surrealist self-portraits. Also covered is a photographic “spread” of Muscle Ramon, a Herculean Spanish bodybuilder and a piece titled “The Height of Queens” discusses Mexican and Colombian cuisine (as well as other non-Latin flavors).
Issue Four includes Daniel Schultz’s tantalizing photographs of Brazilian hunks, which kept my eyes mesmerized for more than a few minutes, and Texas photographer Pablo Moran’s shots of narcissistic desire gave me something curious to study for just as long. Mister Stahle seeks out work that is edgy, intelligent, and sexy—he has sophisticated, laser-beam eyes. The writing is diverse and features everything from legendary writers such as Oscar Wilde, to up-and-coming gay poets. Future issues will feature contemporary queer lit names such as Edmund White and David Sedaris…
John took a few minutes to talk about Ganymede and other things queer, political, and beautiful.
CV: So tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to start producing Ganymede, which is an ambitious and tasteful assemblage of erotic queer male art and word. Does Ganymede have a particular mission it’s trying to fulfill?
JS: To be gay—which means not to be boring. Some of the writers I outreached early on felt that gay literary journals should be high-minded, chaste, Protestant, with no visuals, certainly no male-form photography. Of course, all the gay journals of this description are gone now. They were boring, and to me and many others that meant they were not gay. Every text in Ganymede is illustrated with striking conceptual photography, and between articles, we present the work of some nine cutting-edge gay photographers from all over the world per issue, in portfolios of as many as 20 pages. In these portfolios, there are no ads or intrusive text. You are alone with their art—fascinating first-rate art. It can be quite overwhelming.
CV: There’s an identifiable queer male aesthetic you’re upholding that continues in the tradition of queer pioneers of word and image such as William S. Burroughs, Robert Mapplethorpe, Salvador Dalí, Oscar Wilde, Caravaggio, Francis Bacon, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and countless others. What do you surmise is this style’s organic origin?
JS: I guess that’s for others to say. As we grow, we morph organically, pulling in marvelous varied content from the gay outside. Our sixth issue, for January 2010, will have a dozen gay poets all in one section (more fun that way), each writing with a very different voice, each illustrated by really interesting photographs.
CV: There’s been a tradition executed by our enemies over many centuries—I call it a conspiracy—to carefully edit out, or dilute, queer characters in literature and drama, which makes our true selves invisible to many and only detected by those who can “see” us by “coded” means. Would you say that Ganymede is like a sanctuary for our true selves, where our uninhibited art can survive without fear or shame?
JS: We certainly present uninhibited art and texts, but we also reprint 19th-century texts by famous writers who were obliged to write in code…for instance, Robert Louis Stevenson’s homoerotic mystery stories from his “Suicide Club.” Such work is fascinating too, especially since today we can enjoy coded writing without being oppressed by it.
CV: How can artists, photographers and writers contact Ganymede for submissions queries?
JS: Our main website is at http://www.ganymedenyc.com/ and submission guidelines are at
http://ganymedesubmissions.blogspot.com/
Bravo!
To receive my bimonthly posts straight to your email, register here: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CharlieVazquez
See you in a couple weeks, when I will publish my interview with Jaime Manrique and more…xoxo CV
Queer Latino Musings on Literature is proud to be participating in the first ever “Virtual Latino Book Tour”, which is debuting on the blogosphere with the very talented Puerto Rican-American writer Estevan Vega. Estevan, who is an impressive twenty years old and has already published a few books, will be available for questions, etc, right here on this blog page, via the “Comments” section, on Thursday, June 25th. So if you have things you’d like to ask him, fire away! Here is his artist statement and an excerpt from his latest book, The Sacred Sin.
