Kimberly Gardner (born April 25, 1963)

"Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, back before computers, before email, before the internet–Imagine that!–a book junkie was born. That was me.

Fast forward three decades to a soft spring day in 1997, and find me contentedly reading my eleventy-thousandth romance novel. Sighing, I closed the book and say, “I can do that.”

Voilà! A writer was born!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to walk you through the intervening years day by day, project by project, rejection by rejection. A journey like that would involve far more wailing and gnashing of teeth than even I, with my flare for drama, could stand.

What I will do, is tell you that over the years I have written a little of everything including: a novel-length contemporary romance, two screenplays, dozens of flash fictions and prose poems, short stories of varying lengths, novellas and most recently gay erotic romance.

Gustave Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

And I do. I live in a three-story Victorian with my husband, three cats and a yellow lab named Oliver. Most days I write (at least a little) and read quite a lot.

As to whether my work is violently original … achieving that goal may take the rest of my regular and orderly life."

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Source: www.kimberlygardner.com/home/bio/

Further Readings:

Too Soon for Love by Kimberly Gardner
Paperback: 328 pages
Publisher: MLR Press (February 19, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1608202992
ISBN-13: 978-1608202997
Amazon: Too Soon for Love
Amazon Kindle: Too Soon for Love

Michael Stricker is still reeling from his partner's sudden and untimely death when he meets someone new, someone he could really care about. But first he needs time, time to get his life back in order and time to get over is lost love. But learning to live alone again is nearly impossible with his well-meaning relatives treating him like a poor helpless blind guy. When Alan Stuart befriends Phillip DiMartino's grieving partner, the last thing he expects is to discover hidden lies and infidelity. Guilty over his attraction to the still-grieving man, Alan resolves to stay silent. But the truth has a way of coming out, and soon a dead man's secrets bring about more heartbreak than Alan could have imagined. Although both men vow to keep their distance, staying away is easier said than done, even when it's Too Soon For Love.

More Rainbow Awards at my website: www.elisarolle.com/, Rainbow Awards/2011

Andy Bell & Paul Hickey

Andrew Ivan "Andy" Bell (born 25 April 1964) is the lead singer of the English synthpop duo Erasure. He also has a solo career, with the albums Non-Stop and Electric Blue.

He is openly gay and was a longtime partner of Paul M. Hickey, met in 1990. On 17 December 2004, he publicly announced that he is HIV-positive and has been aware of this since 1998. Bell told Melody Maker in 1986, "I don't want to go out of my way to talk about it but I'm not going to pretend I'm not [gay]. I won't portray a heterosexual in videos and we're consciously doing lyrics that could apply to either sex". He told Barry Walters of Seventeen, "I want to be known as a good performer but it's important to me to take a stance. If you're doing music, you should use it for something and have substance. Being gay and open about it is my substance".

In a 2007 interview, Bell remarked that a complacency exists among gay men about HIV, specifying that: (Picture: Paul M. Hickey)

There are definitely HIV-positive people who meet other HIV-positive men, and like still having unprotected sex. I think it must be quite hard for young gay men because there is so much for them now to do – there are so many saunas and stuff like that for them to go to, and it's so easy to get it."

He has also practised reiki since the early 2000s. He has suffered from avascular necrosis (which has no relationship to his HIV diagnosis) and has had both hips replaced. Bell has stated that this keeps him from "pogoing around" compared to previous performances.


Andy Bell is the lead singer of the duo Erasure. He was partner of Paul Hickey since 1990. Sometimes, A Life of Love, Loss & Erasure is Paul's account of their life. Unflinchingly honest and unashamedly romantic, is the true story of a gay love affair that survives and thrives despite the pressures of the music industry, through highs and lows, in sickness and in health. Moving, shocking, laugh-out-loud funny, it's a warm, witty book that deserves a wide readership. Hickey died on 11 April 2012.

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Bell_%28singer%29

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

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly & Darryl Pottorf

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. (April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011]) was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide.

Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father (also nicknamed Cy, who was briefly a pitcher in Major League Baseball) and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject.

Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word "VIRGIL". In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly's work as “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of postwar art as well.” After acquiring Twombly's Three Studies from the Temeraire (1998–99), the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales said "sometimes people need a little bit of help in recognising a great work of art that might be a bit unfamiliar". He is said to have influenced younger artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel.


Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly (right). Photograph: Jacques Haillot/Corbis Sygma and David Lees/Getty
Cy Twombly was an American artist well known for his large-scale graffiti paintings. He exhibited his paintings worldwide. He studied at the Art Students League of New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg, who encouraged him to attend Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. From 1955 to 1959, he worked in NY, where he became a prominent figure among a group of artists including Robert Rauschenberg – with whom he had a relationship and was sharing a studio – and Jasper Johns.


Ritual, 1949

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

Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.

Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed. He then spent a year living with his mother in Columbia, South Carolina and thereafter he spent several years living with his aunt Gladys in Lake Murray, South Carolina, twenty-two miles from Columbia. He completed high school in Sumter, South Carolina, where he once again lived with his mother. Recounting this period in his life, he says, "In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in." He began drawing when he was three and has continued doing art ever since.

Johns studied at the University of South Carolina from 1947 to 1948, a total of three semesters. He then moved to New York City and studied briefly at the Parsons School of Design in 1949. In 1952 and 1953 he was stationed in Sendai, Japan during the Korean War.


Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns revolutionized the art world. They incorporated everyday objects and popular imagery into their works, thereby pioneering what amounted to an entire new category of visual media. In 1954, after returning to New York, Johns met Robert Rauschenberg and they became long term lovers. Rauschenberg and Johns were in an outlaw marriage from 1954 until 1962, a period that critics consider the most fertile in both artists’ long careers.


Numbers in Color (1958–59)

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

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.

Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City as well as on Captiva Island, Florida until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008.

Rauschenberg was born as Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father was of German and Cherokee ancestry and his mother of Anglo-Saxon descent. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg and Weil decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus, became Rauschenberg's painting instructor at Black Mountain. Albers' preliminary courses relied on strict discipline that did not allow for any "uninfluenced experimentation". Rauschenberg described Albers as influencing him to do "exactly the reverse" of what he was being taught.


Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. After the end of his marriage, Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with fellow artists Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008, on Captiva Island, Florida. He died of heart failure after a personal decision to go off life support. Rauschenberg is survived by his partner of 25 years, artist Darryl Pottorf, his former assistant.



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

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More Artists at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Art

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

Darryl Pinckney & James Fenton

Darryl Pinckney (born 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist.

Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, the capital of the state, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.

Pinckney became a writer. Some of his first professional works were theatre texts, plays developed in collaboration with the director, Robert Wilson. These included the produced works of The Forest (1988) and Orlando (1989).

His first novel is High Cotton (1992), a semi-autobiographical novel about "growing up black and bourgeois" in 1960s America. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Granta, Slate, and The Nation. He frequently explores issues of racial and sexual identities, as expressed in literature.

He returned to theatre with Time Rocker (1995).

In the 21st century, he has published two collections of essays on African-American literature. Pinckney has also expressed his admiration for writing in the long-running American CBS soap opera, As the World Turns.


James Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry. His partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992); the couple has been together since 1989. They live in New York City and Oxfordshire, England. In 2007 Fenton appeared in a list of the "100 most influential gay and lesbian people in Britain" published by The Independent on Sunday.

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

James Martin Fenton FRSL FRSA (born 25 April 1949, Lincoln) is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry. His partner is Darryl Pinckney, the prize-winning novelist, playwright and essayist perhaps best known for the novel High Cotton (1992); the couple has been together since 1989. They live in New York City and Oxfordshire, England.

Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a noted biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. in 1970.

Fenton acquired at school an enthusiasm for the work of W.H. Auden. At Oxford John Fuller, who happened to be writing A Reader's Guide to W.H. Auden at the time, further encouraged that enthusiasm. Auden became possibly the greatest single influence on Fenton's own work.

In his first year at university Fenton won the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet sequence Our Western Furniture. Later published by Fuller's Sycamore Press, it largely concerns the cultural collision in the 19th century between the United States and Japan. It displays in embryo many of the characteristics that define Fenton's later work: technical mastery combined with a fascination with issues that arise from the Western interaction with other cultures. Our Western Furniture was followed by Exempla, notable for its frequent use of unfamiliar words, as well as commonplace words employed in an unfamiliar manner.

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

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

Graham Payn & Noël Coward

Graham Payn (25 April 1918 – 4 November 2005) was a South African-born English actor and singer, also known for being the life partner of the playwright Noël Coward. Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise". After Coward's death, Payn ran the Coward Estate for 22 years.

Beginning as a boy soprano, Payn later made a career as a singer and actor in the works of Coward and others.

Payn was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the son of Francis Dawnay Payn and his wife, Sybil, née Graham.

He was educated in South Africa and, after his parents divorced, in England, where he made his first stage appearance, aged 13, at the London Palladium, as Curly in Peter Pan.

In October 1931, he broadcast as a boy soprano on the BBC in a programme featuring Derek Oldham and Mabel Constanduros, and made further broadcasts in 1932 and 1933.

At the age of 14, he auditioned for the Noël Coward and Charles B. Cochran revue Words and Music (1932). His audition piece, singing "Nearer My God to Thee" while executing a tap dance, was so striking that Payn won two tiny parts in the revue. For 163 performances, he played a busker entertaining a cinema queue as a lead-in to the ballad "Mad About the Boy", and announced, in top hat, white jacket and shorts, the show's other hit song "Mad Dogs and Englishmen".


Graham Payn (25 April 1918 – 4 November 2005) was a South African-born English actor and singer, also known for being the life partner of the playwright Noël Coward. Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise". After Coward's death, Payn ran the Coward Estate for 22 years.

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

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise". (P: ©Allan Warren. Noël Coward's last Christmas card, 1972 (©17))

Coward's most important relationship, which began in the mid-1940s and lasted until his death, was with the South African stage and film actor Graham Payn. Coward featured Payn in several of his London productions. Payn later co-edited with Sheridan Morley the collection of Coward's diaries, published in 1982. Coward's other relationships included the playwright Keith Winter, actors Louis Hayward and Alan Webb, his manager John (Jack) C. Wilson (1899–1961) and the composer Ned Rorem, who published details of their relationship in his diaries. Coward had a 19-year friendship with Prince George, Duke of Kent, but biographers differ on whether it was platonic. According to Payn, Coward maintained that it was simply a friendship. Coward said, on the duke's death, "I suddenly find that I loved him more than I knew." (Picture: Graham Payn)

Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.

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Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No%C3%ABl_Coward

Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story at a Time by Elisa Rolle
Paperback: 760 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (July 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500563323
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/4910282
Amazon (Paperback): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500563323/?tag=elimyrevandra-20
Amazon (Kindle): http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MZG0VHY/?tag=elimyrevandra-20

Days of Love chronicles more than 700 LGBT couples throughout history, spanning 2000 years from Alexander the Great to the most recent winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Many of the contemporary couples share their stories on how they met and fell in love, as well as photos from when they married or of their families. Included are professional portraits by Robert Giard and Stathis Orphanos, paintings by John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, and photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson, Arnold Genthe, and Carl Van Vechten among others. “It's wonderful. Laying it out chronologically is inspired, offering a solid GLBT history. I kept learning things. I love the decision to include couples broken by death. It makes clear how important love is, as well as showing what people have been through. The layout and photos look terrific.” Christopher Bram “I couldn’t resist clicking through every page. I never realized the scope of the book would cover centuries! I know that it will be hugely validating to young, newly-emerging LGBT kids and be reassured that they really can have a secure, respected place in the world as their futures unfold.” Howard Cruse “This international history-and-photo book, featuring 100s of detailed bios of some of the most forward-moving gay persons in history, is sure to be one of those bestsellers that gay folk will enjoy for years to come as reference and research that is filled with facts and fun.” Jack Fritscher

2015 Rainbow Awards Submission: Manipulation by Eden Winters

Manipulation by Eden Winters
Gay Mystery / Thriller
Series: Diversion
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Rocky Ridge Books; 1 edition (November 7, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1626220166
ISBN-13: 978-1626220164
Amazon: Manipulation (Diversion 4)
Amazon Kindle: Manipulation (Diversion 4)

Lucky Lucklighter has a new life. His old life wants him back. He traded trafficking for taking down criminals with the Southeastern Narcotics Bureau, and a drug-lord lover for a man on the right side of the law. Bo Schollenberger found the way past the thorny defenses of Lucky’s heart, and made Mr. I-Get-Along-Fine-Alone think about his and his closets, stevia in the sugar bowl, and a picket fence—with a good lock on the gate. Now Bo is missing, and a voice long silenced asks, “Did you miss me?” Lucky must deal with a devil from his past to get Bo back. And if Bo isn’t willing to come? A drug ring needs its back broken before flooding the US with a designer high, seductive and undetectable. But there’s a fine line between good and evil, and a truckload of temptation urging Lucky to cross.

2015 Rainbow Awards Guidelines: http://www.elisarolle.com/rainbowawards/rainbow_awards_2015.html