San Francisco in Queer Fiction, by the Decade | The Booksmith

Submitted by the Event Organizer

San Francisco has been the location for many works of fiction, from McTeague by Frank Norris to Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Join us Tuesday, October 8, 2019 7 pm at The Booksmith, 1644 Haight (in San Francisco, of course) to hear readings from four novels with San Francisco as their setting, written by LGBTQ authors: Blackmail, My Love by Katie Gilmartin, Eat Sleep Love by Chuck Forester, Steam by the late Jay B. Laws, and Five Windows by Jon Roemer. These books span life in San Francisco from the 1950s to the 70s and 80s to the contemporary city.

Free admission and free refreshments. Book signing after the readings.

Here’s More About These Authors:

• Chuck Forester was raised in northern Wisconsin. He attended Dartmouth and Penn and holds an MCP in city planning and an MFA in poetry. Chuck worked on staff for three San Francisco mayors. His philanthropic work includes leading the successful campaign to establish the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center at the San Francisco Main Library, which raised $3.5 million. Michael A. Schoch, his partner of 18 years, succumbed to AIDS in 1994. Chuck has been an HIV-survivor since 1987. Eat Sleep Love is his latest novel.
• Katie Gilmartin’s checkered past includes stints as a buoyant union organizer, bona fide sex researcher, and deeply engaged college professor. She teaches linocut and monotype classes at Chrysalis Studio in SOMArts and runs the Queer Ancestors Project, devoted to forging sturdy relationships between young Queer and Trans artists and their ancestors. Her illustrated noir mystery, Blackmail My Love, explores real and imagined Queer ancestors in early 1950s San Francisco. Katie’s next novel, Thrill Spot, will be a fictional account of an actual 1954 raid on a lesbian bar called Tommy’s Place, in North Beach.
• Jon Roemer is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. He is founder and senior editor of Outpost19, an award-winning book publisher. He is Queer, a San Francisco resident since 1991, and an explorer of urban change. Jon studied literature and fiction writing at Northwestern University. Five Windows is Jon’s first novel.
• Jay B. Laws was a San Francisco playwright and writer. His first novel, Steam, was published by Alyson Books in 1991 and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Jay died from AIDS in 1992, a week after completing changes on the manuscript for his second novel, The Unfinished, which was published posthumously in 1993. This re-issue of Steam is from ReQueered Tales, a new publisher specializing in republishing out of print Gay and Lesbian works.

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