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A Front Runner in Publishing By Warrior's Mark
Her most successful novel, s was first published by William Morrow in 1974, and has become the most popular gay love story of all time. This landmark classic about the gay relationship between an ex-Marine track coach named Harlan Brown and his Olympic athlete, Billy Sive, has sold an estimated ten million copies worldwide and appeared in many editions in nine languages (English, German, French, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese and Latvian, with the Spanish-language translation forthcoming from Editorial Eagles in Spain. According to independent publishing magazine Foreword, it is still the #1 best-selling gay book overall, and was recently picked by Book of the Month Club for its "Best of the Paperbacks" series. The long-awaited sequel to The Front Runner was Harlan's Race, which continues the bittersweet saga of coach Harlan Brown. Released in June 1994 as Wildcat Press's first title, Harlan's Race instantly became the top-selling hardback novel in gay bookstores, according to the Lambda Book Report and remained on their best-seller list for over a year. Harlan's Race continues to sell strongly, and made #10 on the Foreword list.
The Wild Man promises to be another landmark. It features two young women and two men living in the closet in fascist Spain of the 1960s. The author spent time in Spain between 1964 and 1972, as a liaison between Selecciones, the Spanish edition of RD, and the Readers Digest book staff in the U.S., while the Franco regime was in power. This timely story is relevant to the U.S. of the 1990s, where reactionary religion is steadily gaining power, as it did in Spain before the Spanish Civil War. The Wild Man is a selection for Quality Paperback Club, with some of its foreign-language rights already sold before publication. The author's historical epic, One Is the Sun, published by Ballantine Books in 1991, was nine years in the writing. It is the true story of a great mixed-blood woman chief who lived in the Northwest during the midd-1800s, and the chief's battle against bias and bigotry amidst encroaching missionaries, outlaws and settlers. Warren has also writes a deal of short nonfiction. Her articles and essays have appeared in Los Angeles Times, The Reader's Digest, San Francisco Chronicle, Persimmon Hill, The Advocate, Gay & Lesbian Review, Genre, Philadelphia Gay News, Salon, Des Moines Register, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Woman, Mythosphere and numerous other publications. Warren has always sought to establish her independent perspective on issues. "I listen carefully to others but I am also seeking to know what I myself really think," she says. "Having a considered opinion is not the same thing as reacting to the TV news." Most importantly, Warren likes to tell a powerful and original story that will rouse unsuspected feelings in the reader. "Even in my editorials, I try to tell a story," she admits. "When I craft a story, I put myself within the character, and look for every human parameter in that individual's world. I am not interested in labels or being politically correct. I explore the disastrous consequences of labeling people." Warren's activism started during the 1960s, with her efforts, while a Reader's Digest editor, to have American media recognize the individuality of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the USSR. In the 1970s she moved on to women's rights, where she was the plaintiffs' spokesperson for Susan Smith v. Reader's Digest, a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a class-action victory for women. As a former amateur athlete, she helped lead a group of women distance runners who forced the AAU to change discriminatory rules in the mid-70s. Today Patricia Nell Warren focuses on free speech and issues confronting our youth. In 1996-2000 she served on the Gay and Lesbian Education Commission of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the district's Human Relations Education Commission. She is one of several dozen plaintiffs in ACLU v. Reno and ACLU v. Reno II, important lawsuits seeking to stem federal censorship of the Internet. She is also an investigative journalist who specializes in public-health issues, with a controversial monthly column in A & U, the U.S. AIDSmagazine. Warren lectures nationwide, and conducts writer's workshops. Over the years, she has gotten thousands of letters via snail mail. Now you can e-mail her. Write to Patriciawarren@aol.com. Tell her about your life, your views. Tell her how you see America, the world, people of all colors . . . gays and straights, women and men, old and young. She would especially like to hear from you if you are under 21. Want to know more about her life? Check out her biography. Want to know her views? You can read her archived editorials. Religious righters fumed when her "Concerned Women" ran in the Des Moines Register. Her "Future Shock" in The Advocate shook up the whole gay community. I have found Patricia Nell Warren to be an open, thought provoking individual. Her range of interests that she modestly hasn't mentioned is her work with and for Gay Elders as well as in small wild cats which comprise close to 80% of all wild cats left in the world. The majority of these cats receive little attention in contrast to the large spectacular cats such as Tigers, Snow Leopards, Jaguars and Mountain Lions. Among Patricia Nell Warren's writings are a great number essays on current topics. Following is an extensive list of those essays--important for all educated people to read. Patricia Nell Warren in her own words: In the Crosshairs: As our new President takes office, I will still be feeling that chill up my spine I felt when I saw the website for the "HIV Stops With Me" ad series (www.hivstopswithme.org). The Election: What's Really Going On: As November nears, public apathy about the campaign is a worry. We need to make intelligent choices at the polls -- for President, Congress and local offices. To do that, we need to know what's really going on.
Science for Sale: A life-and-death question is in the air, about medicine and money. Recently the New England Journal of Medicine voiced growing unease with conflict of interest, in a landmark editorial titled "Is Academic Medicine for Sale?" Conflict of interest means financial ties that confer inappropriate or even illegal income to a scientist. Science Marches On: Often supporters of government AIDS policy sound like they are preaching dogma. The word "dogma" comes through church Latin, from a Greek root, meaning public decree. In the early centuries of Christianity, "dogma" emerged as those church beliefs that were decreed to be eternally and infallibly true. Exporting Our Morality: As the world moves toward a global AIDS policy that will affect every heterosexual on the planet, our country is still hammering on homosexuals. Every day I watch the great river of AIDS news coverage, and on the average I still see more talk about gay risk than straight risk go floating by. It seems like moralistic anti-gay outrage is needed to fuel heterosexual AIDS awareness. Chasing Rainbows: GLBT Identity and the Internet: Gay people choose the rainbow as their symbol, yet some of us behave as if there is only one possible color in the universe. In 27 years of being out, I'm intrigued by the absolutism and bias found in our world considering that we're all refugees from absolutism and bias in the heterosexual world. The Internet is a great place to study this paradox. Defining "glbt identity" is a good challenge for a writer who found it impossible to identify as any one thing. The single color is not in my genetic, spiritual or sexual pedigree. My ethnic roots include Irish, Cherokee, German, Melungeon, English, Cree, Jewish, Lakota. I speak several languages, have lived in different milieus, traveled widely, journeyed through several spiritual phases, had relationships with people of both genders, and written on many subjects gay life being just one of them. Elephant Graveyards: Gay Aging and Gay Ageism in the Year 2000 recently a New York Times article about the plight of gay retirees made headlines across the country. At about the same time, I read items on the Internet about a few new retirement communities that would cater to gay people. All are still in the planning stage, but hopes are high. One publication exulted over what "the gay community is doing for its elderly." It would seem that gay ageism is "a subject whose time has come."
The 'White Seas' of Belief: On the open ocean, it is said, you can
sometimes meet a monster wave a hundred
feet high. They are borne when several big waves merge into one. Sailors
call them "white seas." Few ships survive
encounters with these monster waves, which evade detection by weather
technology and have a habit of showing up
on your horizon without warning, shrouded in chill mist and thunder. While
scientists debate if white seas really exist,
a handful of seamen tell their stories of close calls. Years ago, while
editing for a national magazine, I worked on a
first-person article by a freighter captain whose quick thinking saved the
day, as he turned his bow into the huge
wave so the ship wouldn't be struck broadside and rolled over. The wave was
so high that he stared up at it from the
75-foot bridge.
AIDS from Chimps? Not: Some U.S. researchers and media are trying to prove that the AIDS epidemic started with contamination of humans by African monkey retroviruses. Their effort fascinates a commentator like me, because it reveals so much about the inflammatory nature of HIV politics, and the eagerness of some to find easy answers. Thus a recent Reuters story rushed to judgment with this statement: "A chimpanzee named Marilyn has helped confirm that the AIDS virus first passed into people from chimps, researchers said." The Right to Identify: A recent book, Apples and Oranges, gives us new reason to debate the role of choice in being gay. Author Jan Clausen tells of falling in love with a man after 10 years of identifying as lesbian and feminist. Backlash from sisters was swift, devastating. Some friends cut her dead. Her books were removed from lesbian/feminist book lists. Clausen became the latest in politically incorrect. That was Then—This is Now: 25 Years of Being Young and Gay in America: "What was it like, then?" a student asked me recently. "Were you a hippy? Did you go to discos and stuff? Did you, um, wear those nasty polyester clothes?" People often ask me about being young and gay a quarter century ago. They wonder what my views are, on the subjects of how far we've come, and if our youth today have more freedom to live their lives. When I remember back, I find that discos and polyester were the least of my concerns. In fact, contrary to what many gay people believe today, we did not invent disco. In the Sixties, elegant dance clubs called "discotheques were already popular in Europe -- they got imported to the U.S. along with the French fashions that every conventional American wanted to wear" History," as we call it, is seldom as neat as historians make it. How Real is Our Sense of History?: For starters, the feminists got it wrong. In the word "history," "his" likely does not refer to men. The American Heritage Dictionary index of root words shows us that there are astounding relationships among like-sounding root words. "History" probably comes from "hyster," the Greek word for "womb. Why womb? In times gone by, according to my native American aunties, women were the keepers of histories. Civilization's "history" starts with family history, and keeping track of the generations. Men often didn't know who the fathers of children were -- a thing that a mother was far more likely to know. No generation was ever skipped. Some native peoples referred to history as "Belts," because women wore belts rich in symbols of the long oral histories they knew. Oral traditions rode on elaborate memory-aid systems that made sure no child, and no generation, was left out. The Right to be Spiritual: The other day, a young lesbian sent me an email about her struggle to reconcile her love of God with her love of women. She feels lost, totally confused. The only "spiritual people" that she knows are church folks who hate homosexuals. Youth and the Internet: "Youth and the Internet" -- they go together like love and marriage, like a horse and carriage. These are just a few of the articles Patricia Nell Warren has written. In our communications I have found Patricia Nell Warren to be that rare person who's mind searches, questions, probes. It is unusual when that person is just as concerned with what you have to share as she is with what she has to communicate. The body of her work is at times politically incorrect, on the edge, advesarial and soothing. Wildcat Press is aptly named. Like a small Bobcat or Lynx she can purr like a kitten, or attack with all claws out and canines exposed. A woman of many minds and thoughts. My thanks to Patricia Nell Warren, Tyler St. Mark and Wildcat Press for allowing me access and providing insight into much of the above. It is very rare that an established author makes themselves so totally available. I am appreciative of their candor. |
Patricia Nell Warren: Author of the groundbreaking gay work The Front Runner
In 1997 came Billy's Boy, third in the series, a novel of teen innocence
and risk set in the 90s. Not only did this critically
acclaimed novel win the Lambda "Editors' Choice" Literary Award that year,
but it still gets back on best-seller lists two years later, with 20,000
copies already in print.
© 1997-2002 BEI