Marshall Thornton (born February 28)

Marshall Thornton is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter living in Long Beach, California. He is best known for the Boystown detective series, which received an honorable mention in the 2011 and 2012 Rainbow Awards and has twice been a finalist for the Lambda Book Award - Gay Mystery. Other novels include the erotic comedy The Perils of Praline, or the Amorous Adventures of a Southern Gentleman in Hollywood, Desert Run and Full Release. Marshall has an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, where he received the Carl David Memorial Fellowship and was recognized in the Samuel Goldwyn Writing awards. He has also had plays produced in both Chicago and Los Angeles and stories published in The James White Review and Frontier Magazine.

Member Mystery Writers of America

My Favorite Uncle won a 2014 Rainbow Award as Best Gay Contempprary General Fiction.

Further Readings:

My Favorite Uncle by Marshall Thornton
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Wilde City Press, LLC (June 25, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1925180247
ISBN-13: 978-1925180244
Amazon: My Favorite Uncle
Amazon Kindle: My Favorite Uncle

Martin Dixon's carefully-constructed, peaceful life is turned upside down when his super Christian eighteen-year-old nephew Carter shows up unexpectedly on his doorstep and announces he's gay. Martin's first impulse is to send him back to his parents. But when he discovers that Carter has been in a mental hospital to cure his gay-ness he realizes he's stuck with the boy. Unfortunately, the two get on each other's nerves, each driving the other to distraction. Independently, however, they each arrive at the same conclusion. The other would be much less annoying if he only had... a boyfriend.

More Rainbow Awards at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, More Rainbow Awards/2014

Seth Rudetsky (born February 28)

Seth Rudetsky is an American musician, actor, writer, and radio host. He currently is the host of "Seth's Big Fat Broadway" on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio's On Broadway. The show focuses on Rudetsky's knowledge of Broadway theatre history and trivia.

Rudetsky was nominated for the Emmy Award on three occasions for his work as a comedy writer for The Rosie O'Donnell Show. He was a writer for the Grammy Award shows of 1999 and 2000. Rudetsky created the opening numbers for the 1998 and 2000 Tony Awards. Rudetsky also wrote the opening number for the last seven Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Easter Bonnet Competitions, and has been responsible for many of their Gypsy Of The Year shows. On Thursday evenings, he hosts "Seth's Broadway Chatterbox", a one hour talk show, at a New York City club, "Don't Tell Mama". He wrote and performed a one-man show called "Rhapsody in Seth". He often tours with variations on his one-man show. He appeared in the Series Finale of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.

He conducted the orchestra for the November 30, 2007 special performance "Light the Lights--Broadway is Back" end-of-the-strike celebration.

Seth posts video "deconstructions" to his web site in which he deconstructs the singing voices of Broadway performers.

On June 18, 2012, Rudetsky started a website called SETH TV. The site has archives of video and a $5/month subscription fee for exclusive content.

On August 30, 2010, Rudetsky appeared with two-time Tony-winner Sutton Foster in a one-night-only concert performance of They're Playing Our Song at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.

( Read more... )

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Rudetsky

Further Readings:

Broadway Nights: A Romp of Life, Love, and Musical Theatre by Seth Rudetsky
Paperback: 248 pages
Publisher: Alyson Books; First Print edition (October 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1593500106
ISBN-13: 978-1593500108
Amazon: Broadway Nights: A Romp of Life, Love, and Musical Theatre

Welcome to life beneath the wicked stage!

Stephen Sheerin was born to play on Broadway—or at least, under it. He’s a musician, a conductor, and his dream is to music direct a big Broadway musical. After years of toiling in the pit of some of the best-loved (and loathed) hits on the Great White Way, he’s just been given his big break. Can life really be going that well? Of course not—his family is driving him crazy and his boyfriend can’t seem to get rid of his other boyfriend. Then there’s Stephen himself—neurotic and bitchy—who realizes that maybe total happiness is over-rated.

More Spotlights at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, My Lists/Gay Novels

Marc & Vassili Brent-Shields

Marc, a dental-office manager, who at the time he met Vassili was still living at home with his parents in a Boston suburb, didn’t announce his engagement. With little fanfare, he changed the relationship status on his profile from “In a Relationship” to “Engaged.” At the time, he had been dating his fiancé, Vassili Shields, who was then 23, for a year. (Picture: VASSILI & MARC, Erwin Olaf for The New York Times)

They met in the restaurant where Vassili used to work as a waiter. “I thought he was cute the first night he came in with his friends,” Vassili recalled, “but he had one of them climb through the window of the restaurant, instead of walking around and in the front door. So I yelled at him.”

“And I’m ridiculously stubborn,” Marc said, “so I wasn’t about to apologize. For the next month, it was basically a series of dirty looks the times I went in there.”

Vassili eventually broke down and asked Marc on a date to the aquarium. Other dates followed, and nearly a year later, while hanging out at Fritz, a gay sports bar, they decided to become engaged. As Vassili explained it, they considered themselves best friends and planned to be together forever. “So, why not get married?” he said. “I always knew I wanted to spend my life with one person. And I know I’ve found him.” Besides, they both want to be young dads. They plan to adopt before they turn 30.


Marc & Vassili Brent-Shields met in the restaurant where Vassili used to work as a waiter. “I thought he was cute the first night he came in with his friends,” Vassili recalled, “but he had one of them climb through the window of the restaurant, instead of walking around and in the front door. So I yelled at him.” “And I’m ridiculously stubborn,” Marc said, “so I wasn’t about to apologize. For the next month, it was basically a series of dirty looks the times I went in there.” They married on February 2008.

( Read more... )

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27young-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 & http://vassilishields.com/

More LGBT Couples at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Real Life Romance

Arthur Salvadore & William Finn

William Alan Finn (b. February 28, 1952, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American composer and lyricist of musicals. His musical Falsettos received the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Music and Lyrics and for Best Book. Around 1980, Finn met Arthur Salvadore, with whom he has shared his life ever since. Salvadore, a businessman, figures in Finn's ''A New Brain'' as Roger Delli-Bovi, Gordon's patient, responsible lover.

Finn, who is Jewish, grew up in Natick, Massachusetts with his parents and siblings, Michael and Nancy. He majored in music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. When he graduated, he received the Hutchinson Fellowship (a musical composition award). He is also Adjunct Faculty Composer/Lyricist at New York University.

In 1992, Finn suffered deteriorating vision, dizziness and partial paralysis and was rushed to the hospital. He had arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain stem. In September, 1992, he had Gamma Knife surgery, which obliterated the AVM. After the surgery, Finn experienced a year of humbled serenity and constantly felt like he had a "new brain." Finn's 2002 musical A New Brain is based on his experience with AVM and his subsequent successful surgery. He lives with his life partner in New York City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he is a composer and writer. Besides composing for the stage and screen, Finn is member of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing faculty and he has been the Artistic Head of the Musical Theater Lab at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for the past four years.


Arthur Salvadore and William Finn by Harry Roseman
William Alan Finn is an American composer and lyricist of musicals. His musical Falsettos received the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Music and Lyrics and for Best Book. After a surgery, Finn experienced a year of humbled serenity and constantly felt like he had a "new brain." The musical A New Brain is based on his experience. Around 1980, Finn met Arthur Salvadore, with whom he has shared his life ever since. Salvadore figures in A New Brain as Roger Delli-Bovi, Gordon's patient, responsible lover.

( Read more... )

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

( William Finn, 1993, by Robert Giard  )

( Further Readings )

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices

More Real Life Romances at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Real Life Romance

Sir Stephen Spender & Tony Hyndman

Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work. He was appointed the seventeenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.

Spender was born in Kensington, London, to journalist Edward Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet. He went first to Hall School in Hampstead and then at thirteen to Gresham's School in Holt and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but was unhappy there. On the death of his mother he was transferred to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "that gentlest of Schools." Spender subsequently went up to University College, Oxford where, in 1973, he was made an honorary fellow. He left Oxford without taking a degree and subsequently lived for periods of time in Germany. He said at various times throughout his life that he never passed an exam, ever. Perhaps his closest friend and the man who had the biggest influence on him was W. H. Auden. Around this time he was also friends with Christopher Isherwood (who had also lived in Weimar Germany), and fellow Macspaunday members Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. He was friendly with David Jones and later come to know W. B. Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre and T. S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933) was often inspired by social protest. His convictions found further expression in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Viennese socialists, and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an anti-Fascist drama in verse. His autobiography, World within World (1951), is a re-creation of much of the political and social atmosphere of the 1930s.


W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood
In 1933, Stephen Spender fell in love with Tony Hyndman ("Jimmy Younger"). In a letter to Christopher Isherwood in September 1934 he said: "I find boys much more attractive, in fact I am rather more than usually susceptible, but actually I find the actual sexual act with women more satisfactory, more terrible, more disgusting, and, in fact, more everything." In 1936 Spender married Inez Maria Pearn. In 1941 Spender married Natasha Litvin, a concert pianist. This marriage lasted until his death.

( Read more... )

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

( Further Readings )

Book Blast: Best Chance by Aria Grace

Best Chance (More Than Friends 6) by Aria Grace
Series: More Than Friends
Paperback: 194 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (February 19, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1508545162
ISBN-13: 978-1508545163
Amazon: Best Chance (More Than Friends 6)
Amazon Kindle: Best Chance (More Than Friends 6)

Vinnie is happy as a bartender at Ray's and not looking for anything serious to complicate his life. He has great friends and a simple life. When Chance comes into his bar, he brings more than just memories of the summer they spent together in high school. The widower has a fifteen month old son that could change everything for Vinnie, if he’s willing to take the chance.

( Excerpt )

Author Bio: Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Aria enjoys the year round sunshine and laid back environment of the west coast. She lives with her husband and two children on a quiet hill that gives her lots of time to read and write. Her first series was a semi-traditional look at sexy gigs found online. She has now ventured into the exciting M/M world of gay erotica. She loves to hear from readers so please feel free to drop her a note or visit her at www.ariagracebooks.com.

Where to find the author:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aria.grace.37?fref=nf&pnref=story
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/ariagracebooks?ref=hl
Twitter: @ariagracebooks
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/search/?q=ariagracebooks



Tour Dates: February 28, 2015
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