Triangle Awards; And The Band Played On

I noted the Finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards the other day and now the Publishing Triangle has announced their finalists for their 21st Annual Triangle Awards. Each of their awards are named for people who have previously distinguished themselves in that area.

They gave this year's Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award to writer Martin Duberman.

Their LGBT fiction award is named for writers Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley who were life partners. They died within weeks of each other from AIDS back in 1988.

The Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction:

Alison Bechdel, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife
Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage
Blair Mastbaum, Us Ones In Between
Ben Taylor, The Book of Getting Even
Ellen Wittlinger, Love and Lies

The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction:

Evan Fallenberg, Light Fell (Soho Press)
Alistair McCartney, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press)
Shawn Stewart Ruff, Finlater (Quote Editions)

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry:

Jericho Brown, Please, (New Issues)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire (Harper)
Ely Shipley, Boy with Flowers (Barrow Street Press)

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry:

Elizabeth Bradfield, Interpretive Work (Red Hen Press)
Maureen McLane, Same Life (Farrar Straus Giroux)
Elaine Sexton, Causeway (New Issues)

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction:

Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy (University of Chicago Press)
Nancy Polikoff, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon Press)
Andrea Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain (University of Chicago Press)

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction:

Linas Alsenas, Gay America (Amulet Books/Abrams)
Bob Morris, Assisted Loving (Harper)
Kai Wright, Drifting Toward Love (Beacon Press)

This last award is of course named for Randy Shilts, the author of The Mayor of Castro Street, And The Band Played On and Conduct Unbecoming.

I didn't plan on writing about this until I'd finished the book, but I think I need to do so now. I've been reading And The Band Played On this week. I bought a copy last winter, at the same time that I bought The Mayor of Castro Street, but I'm only just now getting around to reading it. I'm a little over a third of the way through the book and it's truly an incredible work.

I'd seen the movie version years ago, but either I'm too far removed from it now to recall whatever impact it had on me at the time or I just wasn't in a place back then to be truly affected by it. Perhaps a film version just couldn't quite do what Shilts' writing does, which is to bring to life these all too real stories of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic. Shilts made every aspect of it very human, bringing it all down to a personal level. This is especially important in retrospect, when so many hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in the United States alone and it can all seem so impersonal and hard to truly wrap your mind around.

I knew it was going to be a book that was very hard to read, emotionally speaking. I don't know how anyone with a heart could read a book like this and not have it just completely tear them up inside. At the same time, I think it's one of the most important books I've ever read.

The other side of the emotional coin as you're reading, of course, is a sense of overpowering anger. I've long since known that the Reagan Administration and the media's lack of response to an epidemic that was at first seen to only be killing gays made things much worse than it ever should have been. Knowing that, though, still doesn't prepare you for reading the actual day to day, year by year details of the struggle to get some answers about AIDS and try and prevent its spread in the face of the massive indifference of those in power.

I think this book should be required reading for everyone, but especially for LGBT youth. A lot of studies are showing HIV infections on the rise in younger gay men, guys who never had to live through any of these awful years and who don't see, because of advances in treatment that keep many of the infected alive for longer periods, HIV/AIDS as that big of a threat. Reading this book would certainly help open their eyes.

I think it would also broaden their understanding of their own history as an LGBT person in this country. I know that it has done so for me.