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George Stambolian (born April 10, 1938 – December 22, 1991, New York) was an American educator, writer, and editor of Armenian descent. Stambolian was a key figure in the early gay literary movement that came out of New York during the 1960s and 1970s. He was best known as the editor of the Men on Men anthologies of gay fiction.Stambolian graduated from Dartmouth College and carried out graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, earning a Ph. D. in 1969 with a dissertation that was subsequently published as Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (1972). From 1966 until his retirement in 1991, Stambolian was a professor in the Department of French at Wellesley College, where he taught courses on French language and literature. He wrote and edited Twentieth Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée (1975) and, with Elaine Marks, Homosexualities and French Literature (1979).
Men on Men: Best New Fiction, edited by Stambolian and including an introduction he wrote, was published by New American Library (Plume) in 1986. The anthology featured the work of some prominent gay authors of that period as well as others less well established. The critical acclaim accorded this volume and its popular success led to the publication of three sequels which Stambolian likewise edited and introduced. He was awarded the 1990 Lambda Literary Award in the category Gay Men's Anthologies for editing Men on Men 3. The fourth of these anthologies was released after his death in December 1991 from complications of AIDS at the age of 53.
Stambolian's parents were Armenian immigrants, and he explored his Armenian heritage in a short story entitled "In My Father's Car" in the third volume of Men on Men. He inspired the gay Armenian American character in Armistead Maupin's Maybe the Moon.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stambolian
I'd become acquainted with that consummately sophisticated critic of French literature, George Stambolian. I knew that he was a professor of French and interdisciplinary studies at Wellesley College. I would learn that he'd attended Dartmouth College and received his PhD from the Univeristy of Wisconsin. I'd perused his study, Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (1972), and the volume he coedited with Elaine Marks, Homosexualities and French literature (1979).( George Stambolian, 1987, by Robert Giard )
But rather than the unquestionable intellectual those text represented, it was the sensual side of Stambolian that I ended up connecting with. He had noticed me, he told me sometime later on in our friendship, in the spring of 1978, while he'd been out walking his dog, Bodo, quite early one Sunday morning: I'd been coming home from a night out dancing and drugging. As I unknowingly passed him, I had my arms aroung two other men, dressed like me, out all night like me, George said. Clearly, we'd looked to George like we were on our way to one of our homes for a menage a trois to screw away the rest of the weekend. This moment had intrigued George and he would refer to it - and to glimpses of me together with the young artist Scott Facon he had at the Pines - as being critical to our connection and to our friendship, even though we never had sex, seldom spoke of it, and never did more than exchange friendly kisses when greeting.
[...]
George had been doing in-depth anonymous interviews with gay men for Christopher Street magazine, one of which had even found its way into that bastion of Nouvelle Vague, the seminal quarterly Semiotext(e). He wanted to interview me, not as Felice Picano, but as a specific Stambolian type, in my case, "a self-made man". I never actually understood what this term signified, even when the interview came out and I read it. But it somehow fit with Stambolian's other in-depth interviews: "With a Handsome Man", "With a Deformed Man", "With an Intellectual", "With an Artist", "With a Dying Man". For George, the very anonymity he provided would offer not so much cover for further excavation and discovery as a screen behind which various kinds of personae and scenarios might more easily develop and flourish. --Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano
( Further Readings )
More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices
Chance to be King by Sue Brown
Author Bio: Sue Brown is owned by her dog and two children. When she isn't following their orders, she can be found plotting at her laptop. In fact she hides so she can plot and has gotten expert at ignoring the orders.