2013 Rainbow Awards Submission: Hayden Thorne - Gold in the Clouds

Gold in the Clouds by Hayden Thorne
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (April 9, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 148279151X
ISBN-13: 978-1482791518
Amazon: Gold in the Clouds
Amazon Kindle: Gold in the Clouds

After his fifteenth birthday, Blythe Midwinter finds himself in a bit of a pickle. It’s high time for him to be a productive member of his family, taking up work he detests in order for his older sister, Molly, to follow her dreams of success as a talented baker. Though the three orphaned Midwinter siblings -- Molly, Bertie, and Blythe -- are lucky enough to work, they still earn only enough to keep themselves clothed and fed. Blythe desperately wishes for more, and it doesn’t help that his best and only friend, Jack Wicket, refuses hard, honest work in favor of good luck as the only means for quick success and instant riches.

Blythe’s dreams of a better life get more desperate when he attracts the attention of another boy, the youngest son of a rebellious old artist, whose family rises well above Blythe’s in wealth and station. Embarrassment and shame muddle Blythe’s perceptions of luck, work, and the promise of love -- that is, until Jack Wicket’s foolish decision to exchange his beloved cow for a handful of magic beans forces Blythe to look past castles in the clouds and understand what it is that truly measures a man’s worth.

Kyle Onstott (January 12, 1887 - June 3, 1966)

Kyle Onstott (January 12, 1887 in Duquoin, Illinois–June 03, 1966 in San Francisco, California) was an American novelist, best-remembered for his best-selling novel Mandingo (1957), which deals with slavery on an Alabama plantation with the fictional name of Falconhurst in the 1830s. The book was made into a film of the same name, which was released in 1975.

The son of a midwestern general store owner, he moved to California with his widowed mother in the early 1900s and was a local breeder and judge in regional dog shows. He was an eccentric who was happy with a life of little work, ample cigarettes, and gin.

After collaborating with his adopted son on a book on dog breeding, he decided to write a book that would make him rich. Utilizing his son's anthropology research on West Africa, he handwrote Mandingo and his son served as editor. Denlinger's, a small Virginia publisher, released it and it became a national sensation, consumed by the public and derided by the critics.

After its paperback release by Fawcett, Onstott began his collaboration with Lance Horner, a Boston eccentric with a knack for recreating Onstott's style. The two men never met, but they collaborated on several books before Onstott's death, after which Horner continued the Falconhurst saga and penned other pulpy novels set in other eras. When Horner died in 1970, Fawcett signed prolific author Harry Whittington to continue writing Falconhurst tales under the name of Ashley Carter.

Although the Falconhurst series has sold near or over 15 million copies, it (and its authors) remain in the shadows of bestselling popular literature.

Source: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/119365.Kyle_Onstott

Child of the Sun, by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, was originally published in 1966 by Gold Medal, one of the most prominent and influential mass market paperback publishers in the country. It was overtly homosexual in theme and content and while marketed to a mainstream, heterodox readership, the jacket copy did not hide its homoerotic subject matter. The cover of the 1972 edition, quoted above, is even more explicit. Curiously, neither cover makes explicit that Varius Avitus Bassianus becomes the infamous Emperor Elagabalus – aka Heliogabalus or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (not to be confused with Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-Emperor) – whom semi-serious readers of history would have known as the man that Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, claimed ―abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury.
[...]
Novels such as Gore Vidal‘s City and the Pillar (1948), James Barr‘s Quatrefoil (1950) and Fritz Peters‘s Finistere (1951) had all seriously addressed queer themes nearly two decades before. And, in terms of explicit sex, John Rechy‘s City of Night shocked readers with its life and times of queer hustlers in 1963 and his even more explicit Numbers would be published in 1967. More saliently, Mary Renault had been mining the classical-age of homo-lit with The Last of the Wine (1956), The King Must Die (1958) and Fire from Heaven (1969). Of course Renault‘s elegant literary peregrinations won her accolades of good taste and insightful characterization – the inverse of the heaving and pulsating antics of Child of the Sun.
So can anything positive actually be said about Child of the Sun? Well, it is fun to read as long as you don‘t expect much in the way of literature. Like Mandingo and their other American historical novels, Onstott and Horner know how to tell a story in the most basic, page-turning, sometimes even mindnumbing, manner.
[...]
Child of the Sun is a fascinating historical pop-culture curiosity that doesn‘t really connect to the great gay novels of the 1950s; by the time Stonewall happened a few years later, it felt old fashioned. This makes it both singular and special; one more tile in the complicated mosaic of what we now call 20th century gay literature. --Michael Bronski, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered

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Robert La Tourneaux (1945 – June 3, 1986)

Robert La Tourneaux (1945 – 3 June 1986) was an American actor best known for his role of Cowboy, the good-natured but dim hustler hired as a birthday present for a gay man, in the original Off-Broadway production and 1970 film version of The Boys in the Band.

La Tourneaux made his Broadway theatre debut in the 1967 musical Illya Darling. In 1968, he was part of the ensemble for Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which opened on April 14, 1968 at Theater Four in New York City. The advertisement for the film version used head shots of Leonard Frey and La Tourneaux, with La Tourneaux identified as the "present" for Frey’s birthday-celebrating character. Many newspapers refused to run the advertisement.

La Tourneaux’s career stalled after the film version of The Boys in the Band was released. His only other film performances were a supporting part in the Roger Corman film Von Richthofen and Brown (1971) and the independent film Pilgrimage. He also had a small role in a 1974 made-for-television version of the Maxim Gorky play Enemies.

On stage, La Tourneaux appeared in a small role in a Broadway revival of The Merchant of Venice; he was slated to appear in the 1977 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, but was dropped from the cast prior to the show’s opening.

The openly gay La Tourneaux initially blamed his being typecast as a gay hustler for his inability to receive worthwhile roles, stating in a 1973 interview, "Boys was the kiss of death for me.” In the 1978 anthology Quentin Crisp’s Book of Quotations, La Tourneaux compared his career to another gay actor by saying, "Charles Laughton played every kind of part, but never a homosexual. People knew he was gay, but his public image [which included a wife] never betrayed his public reality. So he was safe. I wasn’t safe."


La Tourneaux in After Dark magazine, 1969

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

Harold's birthday present in the play is a laconic $20-a-night hustler whom Harold immediately nicknames Tex. Murray Gitlin had asked Robert La Tourneaux to audition for the part after he met him at the Westside YMCA. "He was one of the most beautiful young men," Gitlin recalled. La Tourneaux hesitated at first because he thought it was demeaning to play a hustler. But after the play became a hit, he repeated the role in London and Los Angeles, and again for the film. La Tourneaux complained during the seventies that he never got any more good roles because he "was typecast as a gay hustler, and it was an image I couldn't shake." By 1978, he was working in a male porno theater in Manhattan, doing a one-man cabaret act. Then life imitated art altogether: La Tourneaux became a hustler. "He tried to extort money from someone who was supposedly a friend-probably a john," said Githn. La Tourneaux was arrested and sent to the New York City prison on Rikers Island. There he tried to kill himself. Finally he was hospitalized at Bellevue where Gitlin went to visit him: "He was in a private room with leg shackles. And the guard guarding twenty-four hours a day, wearing a gown and mask. It was just awful. And Bob just kept getting sicker and sicker. It was just such a waste: he was so sweet and so beautiful and had so much going for him. I saw him a couple of weeks before he died. He was in Metropolitan Hospital, he was out of prison. And the nurse who was assigned to him had seen The Boys in the Bandon television the night before. And he died in her arms. And to her, he was a star." --Charles Kaiser. The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (Kindle Locations 2783-2793). Kindle Edition.

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Andy Milligan (February 12, 1929 – June 3, 1991)

Andy Milligan (February 12, 1929 – June 3, 1991) was an American playwright, screenwriter, cinematographer, actor, film editor, producer, and director, whose work includes 27 films made between 1965 and 1988: Monstrosity, 1991; The Weirdo, 1989; Legacy of Blood, 1978; The Man with Two Heads, 1972; The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!, 1972; Guru, the Mad Monk, 1971; Bloodthirsty Butchers, 1970; The Body Beneath, 1970; Nightbirds, 1970 and more than 40 other horror films, including Vapors and Depraved.

Apart from his unhappy childhood and adolescence, Milligan had a very troubled personal life that he often avoided talking about. In 1968 he married Candy Hammond, a North Carolina stage actress and former "erotic dancer" who starred in a few of his films. The wedding service took place on February 24, 1968, at his Staten Island house located on 7 Phelps Place, which was still decorated for a movie shoot and attended by most of the crew people working on the film as well as his father and Japanese stepmother. Almost no one took the wedding seriously because Milligan was unabashedly homosexual and an avowed misogynist. That night he was said to have cruised gay bars in New York City to celebrate. Candy divorced him the following year, apparently due to neglect as he was more focused on his filmmaking career, and she returned to her North Carolina hometown.

Milligan had a reputation throughout his life of being extremely demanding and bad-tempered, often provoking fights or arguments with actors, film producers and financers as well as strangers he would meet on the street. He would be abusive and frequently shout and yell at actors working on his films or plays for not getting the work done fast enough and even physically assault actors and actresses often by slapping them across their faces and laughing if the women he slapped would break down and cry. A non-smoker and non-drinker, Milligan was said to throw fits and tantrums in public and private if people around him smoke, drank, or used drugs. Milligan also never had a drivers license and relied on public transportation wherever he lived.


AIDS Quilt

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

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GayRomLit Ebook Giveaway: Anna Zabo - Close Quarter

I asked to all the authors joining the GayRomLit convention in Atlanta in October (http://gayromlit.com/grl-authors) a personal favor, a special Ebook Giveaway: twice a week I will post 1 book from each author, and among those who will leave a comment, I will draw a winner. Very easy and very fast ;-) I will send a PM to the winner, so remember to not leave anonymous comments!

And the ebook giveaway goes to: ls1966

Today author is Anna Zabo: Anna Zabo writes erotic paranormal romance and fantasy. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which isn’t nearly as boring as most people think. A lover of all things fae, and wonderful, she looks for the magical in the cracks of her city. She has a MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.
Website: http://www.annazabo.com
Most recent title: Close Quarter
Publishers: Loose Id

Close Quarter by Anna Zabo
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (November 13, 2012)
Amazon Kindle: Close Quarter

On a transatlantic cruise to New York, sculptor Rhys Matherton struggles to piece his life back together after losing his mother, inheriting a fortune, and finding out his father isn't his father after all. He spills a tray of drinks on a handsome stranger, then he finds himself up against a wall getting the best hand-job he’s ever had. And for the first time in his life, he feels whole.

Rhys enjoys the company of Silas Quint, but for the eerie way no one pays attention to them even while they kiss in a crowded bar. Silas explains he's a forest fae able to glamor the room around them--and more importantly, that he's on the cruise to hunt vampires. Rhys thinks Silas is full of it, until he discovers vampires are real, and he’s part of their main course.

Silas Quint can’t be distracted by a human lover, even one as lovely as Rhys. Stuck in the middle of the ocean, he has barely enough of energy to hunt the vampires he’s been sent to destroy. Rhys is full of the one thing Silas needs needs most--the element of living plants. Only sucking energy from Rhys would make Silas as soulless as the creatures he hunts. How can he keep Rhys safe, without becoming like the very monsters he hunts?