Elisa - My reviews and Ramblings

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I think the most valuable asset of this YA novel by Madison Parker is that she didn’t shy away from making her characters very true, and as such, not always perfect or likable.

Take the main character, Lucas; he is a nice boy, studious and passionate about music, and he is gay; but he is also flamboyant, exaggerated without wanting to be, feminine, as other boys and girls, and even some adults (probably even his parents) said, he is a “sissy”. Lucas is not flashing it, he was always like that; when he was just a toddler, he liked pretty things, sparkly jewelry, his mother’s make-up. And he liked music, classical music but also pop-music, Cindy Lauper, and everything that was able to express out his joy of life. But now that he is a teenager, being a sissy makes him the misfit at school, the one other people make fun of, and even his parents, while accepting, would like for him to man it up a little. But that is not Lucas’s nature, and that is torturing him.

In his growing journey, Lucas will meet three very different boys: Dominic, the only other openly gay boy at school, flamboyant as Lucas, but also bitchy, pushing and sometime even dangerous; Dominic will be Lucas’s first experience as gay boy in a relationship, and someone who will teach Lucas that he has to be very careful with his heart.

At the same time Lucas will meet Alex; Alex is an interesting character, and allow me to digress a little from the story. While I have read YA novels about gay, lesbian and even transgender kids, I think I have never read about a bisexual boy; or better, yes I read about teenagers who while always dating and loving girls, meet another boy and fall in love, but it was more black&white, like for everything else at that age. Or you like girls or you like boys, for a teenager I think it’s difficult to comfortably living with the concept that you like both; at that age you need confirmation, assurance, it can be tragic and troubling discovering you like boys, but once you accept that, at least you have a firm point, I’m gay. I think Alex, while being in love with another girl, is basically a bisexual man. Alex is comfortable with Lucas, has no problem to give him his first kiss, but it’s more to give Lucas confidence in himself than for a sexual reason; Alex is not in love with Lucas, but I suppose that, if his heart was free, he could be feel attraction for him; or maybe he does, but one thing is attraction and the other thing is love. Alex is a very positive character, someone who would be good to meet for a boy like Lucas in the fragile period that is your teenage hood.

Finally meet Zach, Lucas’s true and unrequited love, the handsome but very private boy writing wonderful love poems. Lucas’s brother’s swim teammate, someone who Lucas admitted from afar for a long period. Zach would be the perfect boyfriend, but even if he was gay, he is totally unreachable for Lucas, Zach is part of the “cool guys” team, a team Lucas will be never part of. But then, little by little, Lucas will find out that behind the cool appearance, Zach is not only an ordinary boy, but even someone who maybe has not had an easy upbringing, someone who needs to be loved and accepted, someone who will never hurt Lucas like other boys did.

Very, very nice YA novels, little warning to the very young readers, the story got its good share of sex scenes, so maybe I would recommend it to slightly older boys and girls.

http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=3701

Amazon: Play Me, I'm Yours
Amazon Kindle: Play Me, I'm Yours
Paperback: 244 pages
Publisher: Harmony Ink Press (April 1, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1623809193
ISBN-13: 978-1623809195

Reading List: http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle

Jackie "Moms" Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken (March 19, 1894 – May 23, 1975) was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of African-American vaudeville. She took her stage name, Jackie Mabley, from an early boyfriend, commenting to Ebony in a 1970s interview that he'd taken so much from her, it was the least she could do to take his name. Later she became known as "Moms" because she was indeed a "Mom" to many other comedians on the circuit in the 1950s and 1960s. She came out as a lesbian at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first triple-X rated comedians on the comedy circuit.

During the 1920s and 1930s she appeared in androgynous clothing (as she did in the film version of The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson) and recorded several of her early "lesbian stand-up" routines. Mabley was one of the top women doing stand-up in her heyday, eventually recording more than 20 albums of comedy routines. She appeared in movies, on television, and in clubs, and performed at the Michigan Women's Festival shortly before her death in 1975.

Mabley was born in Brevard, North Carolina. Although she always claimed a birthdate of 1894 and that she was one of a family of twenty children, the 1900 Federal Census shows "Loretter Aiken" in Brevard was born in March 1897 and was the youngest of four (out of five) surviving children of James P. and Mary Aiken. Her father owned and operated several businesses, while her mother kept house and took in boarders. Her father died in an accident when Loretta was eleven. In 1910, her mother took over their primary business, a general store.

James Aiken's father, Henry Aiken, was part white. His mother, Bettie, was able to read and write in the 1870 census, five years after the abolition of slavery, which suggests she may have been a free woman of color. Loretta Mabley's genealogist, D. Richmond, wrote: "She has a very interesting lineage worth researching."

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moms_Mabley

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Naomi Replansky (born May 23, 1918) is an American poet who was born in the Bronx; she currently resides in Manhattan. SInce 1986, she's shared her life with the prose writer Eva Kollisch (born August 17, 1925 in Wien), who escaped from Hitler's Europe in the famous Kindertransport. As a young woman, Replansky met Brecht through a friend in New York, and their association continued. While in LA, she translated a Brecht poem called "The Swamp," which she says probably described the morphine addiction of the actor Peter Lorre, a close friend of Brecht in Europe and California.

Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, such as No More Masks!, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, and Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era. Four collections of her work have appeared: Ring Song (Scribners 1952), Twenty-One Poems, Old and New (Gingko Press 1988), The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press 1994), Collected Poems (Black Sparrow Press/Godine, forthcoming 2011).

"My chief poetic influences," Replansky states, "have been William Blake, folk songs, Shakespeare, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson and Japanese poetry."

Ring Song, containing poems written from 1936 to 1952, was nominated for the National Book Award. Of the following hiatus in publication, she says, “I write slowly.” The chapbook Twenty-One Poems contains versions of work contained in the other two collections. The Dangerous World contains forty-two new poems as well as twenty-five revised poems from Ring Song. The meticulousness of her work indicates a painstaking mind and an unusual degree of perfectionism in the craftsmanship of her poems. Though often small in scale, they are giant in meaning.


Naomi Replansky and Eva Kollisch

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Replansky

( Naomi Replansky, 1995, by Robert Giard )

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My friend Paul contacted me with a wonderful news: he is getting married! This is a wonderful news, but it's even more wonderful because Paul is supporting a charity project and of course I'm all for spreading the news. So please welcome Paul and share with him this joyous news:



Several years ago, I painted Noah's Gay Wedding Cruise to express my optimism about the marriage equality movement. I believed we were on the cusp of great progress, and I chose to symbolize our inevitable victory with my own version of the Noah's Ark story. I painted a grand ark/cruise ship filled with happy gay and lesbian animal couples and a few human guests too (like Ellen DeGeneres/Portia de Rossi, and Elton John/David Furnish). There are even some drowning sinners (such as Ann Coulter, Larry Craig, Sally Kern, and Fred Phelps)!

Fast-forward to now. Indeed we have come a long way! Twelve states have legalized gay marriage, and important decisions about DOMA and Proposition 8 are being considered by the Supreme Court. Unfortunately I still live in a state where I am not allowed to get married, but Dennis and I have decided to do it anyway. We are excited to be a part of a special initiative by the group MarriageEvolved called C-Bus of Love. Along with 24 other LGBT couples (who also can't get married in their home states), we will be traveling by bus to Washington D.C. this June to get married on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.



In honor of this, I'm releasing a special new print -- Noah's Gay Wedding Cruise: MarriageEvolved Edition. It's an update of my original painting with the addition of Joshua and Steve Snyder-Hill, the two founders of MarriageEvolved. Steve is the soldier who was booed during the Republican primaries last year after asking a question about Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The incident caused great controversy for the candidates who did nothing to discourage the crowd from booing someone serving their country. I can't imagine the bravery it must have taken to out himself on international television while on active duty. Together, he and Joshua have championed the cause of marriage equality, even fighting DOMA on the national level to establish equality for LGBT military spouses, and they won't rest until everyone in this country who wants to get married will have the right to do so. I'm proud that they are our friends and thrilled to add them to the crew of Noah's Gay Wedding Cruise -- especially since they are the co-captains of our own upcoming wedding excursion!


Josh & Steve

100% of the profits from the sale of Noah's Gay Wedding Cruise: MarriageEvolved Edition will be donated to MarriageEvolved to help pay for the C-Bus of Love trip and future advocacy work of the organization. It's an important, worthwhile cause and I encourage everyone to show their support by purchasing a limited-edition print today. They are available in three different sizes in my online store HERE.

13" x 11" - $35
20" x 16" - $75
26" x 20" - $150

Visit the C-Bus of Love website to learn more about our upcoming road trip for equality. And check out our wedding bio while you're there!


Dennis & Paul

So, what you are waiting for? go and buy these wonderful prints to support MarriageEvolved, and to close this post, I want to add my "special edition", the Gold Marriage LGBT Couples, those partners who managed to stay together for more than 50 years, despite the history "telling" them they were not married, but in their case, the legal papers didn't mean nothing, they were officially married in their heart.

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Chris Salvatore (born May 22, 1985) is an American actor, singer-songwriter, model, and gay-rights activist. He is currently sitting at #41 on AfterElton's top 50 gay celebrities.

Growing up in the small town of Richboro, Pennsylvania, he spent his days singing, acting, and performing for his family. By the time he was 15, young Chris had already written his first song. After completing his high school education, Salvatore began his career in 2005 during his attendance at Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, he studied vocal performance and soon began recording songs.

After some time at Berklee, Salvatore moved to New York City in 2006 to try his hand at acting. Once there, he enrolled in The New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts and realized his talent and love for film. Salvatore completed his schooling and began preparing for the big leagues in Los Angeles. He was contacted by a casting director for Q. Allan Brocka's Eating Out film series and within the week, Salvatore moved to California to star as "Zack" in Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat (2009). He continued the role in two additional films in the series: Eating Out 4: Drama Camp (2011) and Eating Out 5: The Open Weekend (2012).

Chris Salvatore is known for his single "Dirty Love" (released in 2010). Recently, Salvatore has been uploading short musical covers of songs he and his fans like to his YouTube channel (which currently has over 12,000 subscribers). In addition to song covers, he spends his time evangelizing equality in the LGBT community. Some of his videos include messages for the It Gets Better Campaign while others are simply kind and uplifting messages of hope. His latest efforts include the singles 'What You Do To Me' (2012) and the ballad 'Hurricane' (2012).

Salvatore's songs have been featured on MTV's show Paris Hilton's My New BFF and in the movie credits of Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat.



Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Salvatore

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Sasha Alyson (born May 22, 1952) is an American businessman who started Alyson Publications in 1979. It was based in Boston, Massachusetts, where Alyson lived at the time. The company concentrated on subjects important to gay people. The company particularly focused on groups that were under-represented in gay literature, including gay youth, black gay men, and older gay people. In 1990, he created the imprint "Alyson Wonderland" to publish children's books that depicted families with lesbian and gay parents. Under the penname Johnny Valentine, Alyson wrote some of these children's books including "The Duke Who Outlawed Jelly Beans" (1991) which won a Lambda Literary Award.

In 1988, Alyson initiated publication of the book "You Can Do Something About AIDS," in which members of the publishing cooperated to produce a 126-page book that was distributed free through bookstores. Other publishers and writers contributed articles and funding, and Elizabeth Taylor wrote the book's introduction. A first printing of 150,000 copies was gone in 10 days, and the book went through additional printings. As a result of this work, Alyson received the first Lambda Literary award for Publisher's Service.

By 1992, Alyson Publications had become the largest independent publisher of gay and lesbian books, with sales of almost one million dollars a year. Alyson, and his company, were named "Publisher of the Year" by the New England Booksellers Association in 1994.

Alyson announced in 1992 that he had decided to retire, and was taking steps to find a way for the company to continue without him. Three years later, he sold the business to Liberation Publications, publisher of the gay magazine, "The Advocate." The new owner moved the offices to California (and later to New York) and renamed it "Alyson Books".

Alyson also founded Bay Windows, a weekly gay newspaper in Boston, in 1983. It is still published, under different ownership.

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasha_Alyson

( Sasha Alyson, 1988, by Robert Giard )

Bertha Harris (December 17, 1937 – May 22, 2005) was an American lesbian novelist. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she moved to New York City in the 1960s. She is highly regarded by critics and admirers, but her novels are less familiar to the broader public.

She is best known for her stylistically bold novel Lover, published in 1976. She published two other novels, Catching Saradove (1969), and Confessions of Cherubino (1972). Lover and Confessions of Cherubino were brought out by the independent house Daughters, Inc., a small publisher of women's fiction. In all three novels, Harris engaged the aesthetics of late twentieth-century literature; they may be considered examples of literary postmodernism. Her novels are stylistically akin to the work of modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes (whom she greatly admired), and she has acknowledged as inspiration the work of Jill Johnston and the dancer Yvonne Ranier. She once proclaimed that Djuna Barnes's work was "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.

Much of Harris's work, most notably Lover, is written with the Women's Movement of the 1970s as its primary inspiration and its audience. Indeed, Lover might be viewed as a literary mother of Queer Theory; her novel resonates almost as strongly with third-wave feminism as it does with the second-wave feminism of its origins.

Harris co-authored The Joy of Lesbian Sex in 1977 with Emily L. Sisley, and in 1995 she published Gertrude Stein, a biography for young adults. Lover was reissued in 1993 by the New York University Press with a new introduction by the author, mainly recounting her involvement with Daughters Press and its two owners.

At the time of her death she was completing her fourth novel, a comedy, Mi Contra Fa. She died in New York City.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Harris

( Bertha Harris, 1993, by Robert Giard  )

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James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "Harlem was in vogue".

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie (Caroline) Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes (1871–1934). Both parents were mixed race, and Langston Hughes was of African American, European American and Native American descent. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Both his paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, and both his paternal and maternal great-grandfathers were white: one of Scottish and one of Jewish descent. Hughes was named after both his father and his grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston who, in 1888, became the first African American to be elected to the United States Congress from Virginia. Hughes's maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, she first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race. He joined the men in John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds.

In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, of African American, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry. He and his younger brother John Mercer Langston worked for the abolitionist cause and helped lead the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in 1858.

Charles Langston later moved to Kansas where he was active as an educator and activist for voting and rights for African Americans. Charles and Mary's daughter Caroline Mercer Langston was the mother of Langston Hughes. Hughes's father left his family and later divorced Carrie. He went to Cuba, and then Mexico, seeking to escape the enduring racism in the United States.

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes

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Jane Addams (September 6, 1860 – May 21, 1935) was a pioneer settlement worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace. Beside presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, she was the most prominent reformer of the Progressive Era and helped turn the nation to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities. She is increasingly recognized as a member of the American pragmatist school of philosophy. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Throughout her life Addams was close to many women and was very good at eliciting the involvement of women from different classes in Hull House's programs.

Her closest adult companion and friend was Mary Rozet Smith (December 23, 1868 - 1934), who supported Addams's work at Hull House, and with whom she shared a romantic friendship. Together they owned a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine.

In 1889 she and her college friend and intimate partner, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founded Hull House in Chicago, Illinois, the first settlement house in the United States.

The run-down mansion had been built by Charles Hull in 1856 and needed repairs and upgrading. Addams at first paid for all of the capital expenses (repairing the roof of the porch, repainting the rooms, purchasing the furniture) and the bulk of the operating costs. But gifts from individuals supported the House from its first year and over time, Addams was able to reduce the proportion of her contributions, although the annual budget grew rapidly. A number of wealthy women became important long-term donors to the House, including Helen Culver, who managed her first cousin Charles Hull's estate, and who eventually allowed them to use the house rent free, Louise deKoven Bowen, Mary Rozet Smith, Mary Wilmarth, and others.

Addams and Starr were the first two occupants of the house, which would later become the residence of about twenty-five women. At its height, Hull House was visited each week by around two thousand people. Its facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gym, a girls' club, a bathhouse, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, and a library, as well as labor-related divisions. Her adult night school was a forerunner of the continuing education classes offered by many universities today. In addition to making available social services and cultural events for the largely immigrant population of the neighborhood, Hull House afforded an opportunity for young social workers to acquire training. Eventually, Hull House became a thirteen-building settlement complex, which included a playground and a summer camp (known as Bowen Country Club).


Jane Addams & Mary Rozet Smith

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Addams

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