Event: A Reading with Michael Schiavi

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Date: 07/30/2011
Time: 5:30 pm
Place: Giovanni’s Room
At 12th & Pine Streets in Philly's "Gayborhood" in Center City
345 South 12th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Michael Schiavi is the author of Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo.

The first critical biography of gay-rights activist Vito Russo. "Celluloid Activist" illuminates, through the life of this fascinating individual, some of the most explosive cultural revolutions in American history and significantly expands the fields of gay film studies, biography, and history.

Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (May 10, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0299282309
ISBN-13: 978-0299282301
Amazon: Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo

Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read.

But Russo was much more than a pioneering journalist and author. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film.

Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activistprovides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism.