Go to you local bookstore. Do it. Now. Check where they’ve shelved my book. Yup, you’ve guessed it – in the “Gay and Lesbian” section. Not, decidedly, in the “Catholic” section.

Well, thanks to my new best friend Dave Daniels, I hereby ordain you for a very special ministry. You’ve heard of the Guerrilla Queer Bar movement? It involves an organized effort to have hundreds of gay people take over a specified “straight” Boston establishment on a given night to transform it instantly into a gay club. I have riffed on this concept before, seeking to establish a Guerrilla Queer Church movement, in which all the gay Catholics and divorced people and romancatholicwomenpriests and married priests and anybody else at the margin of the Church takeover a given mainstream Church on a given Sunday. (Feel free to start a Guerrilla Queer Church movement in your area; I just started a Facebook group for the Boston-area group here. Join now. Maybe we’ll start taking churches over this fall.)

But I digress. Your ministry is the Guerrilla Queer Bookshelf. How does it work? You gather up about half the copies of my book from the “Gay and Lesbian” section and hustle them over to the “Catholic” section, where you lovingly re-shelve them (cover facing out, of course!) – and press a copy on anyone who happens to be browsing in that area. We’ll take back these bookstores, one shelf at a time!

And, btw, thanks for Dave for the idea – he is the original Queer Bookshelf Guerrilla. He is also a photographer -- and talk about pornography! Dave has a collection of shots of the inside of one of Boston’s many churches posted here that are absolutely gorgeous – pure spiritual pornography, designed to make a gay Catholic boy’s heart race! Take a look. No box of tissues required to clean up the mess.

Unholy Wine of the Week (the stuff you wish they would consecrate): Domaine Marcel Deiss 2002 Engelgarten from Alsace is a magnificent effort. No slight white, it bursts with strong exotic flavor, edgy acids, a bit of menthol, and a slightly off-dry, viscous mouthfeel. A blend of the noble grapes of Alsace, mostly pinot gris and Riesling. Pricy, but can stand up to a wide range of foods. If you read French, the vineyard is here.

 

Tags: book cover, books, bookshelves, catholic, civil disobedience, gay, guerrilla, lesbian

Sex and The Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth, by Daniel A. Helminiak (Binghamton: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 235pp.

 

                Daniel Helminiak’s project in his 2006 collection of previously published essays, Sex and the Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth, is a naked act of reclamation.  Helminiak, a Catholic priest, professor of psychology and longtime member of the gay Catholic group Dignity, sets his sights on terms like “spirituality”, “Christianity”, and “natural law,” and wrests them from those who would use them to oppress gay people.  He provides a cogent re-description of these and related terms in an effort to draw gays and lesbians back to the Eucharistic table.  Helminiak’s manner is gentle and affirming: he knows that he is preaching to a GLBT audience of the wounded, who regard religious concepts with wariness at best and an understandable outright hostility in many cases.  Heroically, he barely acknowledge Sisyphusian nature of his project; he says one thing that brings GLBT spiritual beings close; religious authorities say something new and hurtful that drives them away all over again.

                Because he starts from Ground Zero (literally: many of these essays invoke 9/11), some of Helminiak’s statements and conclusions are so obvious as to be banal.  But patience with these initial assertions pays off: they are building blocks to more ambitious arguments.

Helminiak begins by … [remainder of the review at http://sincemylastconfessionnews.blogspot.com/2008/05/sex-and-sacred.html

 

by Scott Pomfret, www.sincemylastconfession.com

Tags: book review, books, sacrament, sacred, sex

My non-writing friends are always surprised when I tell them that we authors who are neither Steven King nor Dan Brown have very little control over their book covers. Book covers tend to be imposed from on high. Occassionally, authors are given the right to “consultation” on the cover. In my experience, consultation consists of patient nodding by some low-level publishing house flack who smiles as if you were a deranged and potentially violent denizen of the local insane asylum. Then the publisher does whatever it deems fit.

(Imagine our shock when the new publisher of our Romentics line of romance novels – Palari Books – actually solicited our ideas for a cover! Thanks, Dave!)

The main driver of book covers is not, however, the publisher. It is the book buyer – specifically, the book buyer for Barnes & Noble and for Borders. Believe it or not, this is (or at least was) a single person wielding inordinate, kingmaking power. When Warner Books (now Hachette Book Group/Grand Central Publishing) agreed to publish the first Romentics gay romance novel my boyfriend and I wrote in 2005, the editors already had a cover selected. In my humble opinion, it was a good one and matched the tone of the book – naughty and irreverent and at the same time earnest.

Unfortunately, the B&N book buyer did not feel the same way – s/he deemed the cover “too 90s, too beefcake” for the fragile sensibilities of B&N shoppers. The demand: change the cover or B&N buys nothing. Warner Books, of course, vigorously defended the cover and went head-to-head with the buyer, refusing to have creative decisions dictated to them. Well, not so much. Instead, Warner immediately caved and had their in-house art folk whip up a pink-and-green “chick-lit” cartoon cover that was dated from day one. Even though I knew the cover, I walked right by it in the “New releases” section of the store. It just did not stand out.

We protested. Warner said, “Too bad. Too late.”

Here … vote. Which book would you be more likely to pick up?

I thought my cover issues had ended, but no – the cover gods simply do not love me! At Arcade, a much smaller and much more thoughtful publishing house, we devised (and distributed to all the online sites) a cover that was workable, but no one’s favorite. Ultimately, book buyers had a universal reaction: they hated it. (And not just buyers for B&N … they ALL hated it.)

Just four months before publication and with the “old” cover all over the internet, we went back to the drawing board. Here’s what we came up with:

Let me know what you think. Do you like the “old” cover? Or the new one? Try me at Scott.Pomfret [at] gmail [dot] com.

And speaking of covers, check out the Romentics cover changes implemented by our E-Book publisher Loose-ID. Any preferences?

Tags: authors, barnes and noble, books, bookstore, borders, covers, publishing, writing