Ann Bannon, Malcolm Boyd, and Mark Thompson To Receive Pioneer Awards
From Lambda Literary Foundation
March 8, 2008—The Lambda Literary Foundation has named Ann Bannon, Malcolm Boyd, and Mark Thompson as this year’s recipients of its Pioneer Award, to be presented at the Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony on May 29, 2008 in West Hollywood, California.
The Lambda Literary Foundation bestows its Pioneer Award on those individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature and publishing. Established in 1995, the Award honors those who, through their achievements and passionate commitment, have contributed to the LGBT literary community in significant and tangible ways: through works of literature, or by establishing publishing houses, publications, archives, bookstores, or other institutions.
“My Pioneer Award sits prominently on my bookshelf, each day signifying that I've made a meaningful contribution to the literary community I love. No other award could possibly mean more,” observes Katherine V. Forrest, recognized in 1998 for her body of work and literary activism. Other recipients include L. Page "Deacon" Maccubbin, Lambda Rising; the Astraea Foundation (2001); Barbara Grier, Naiad Press (2002); Amazon Bookstore Cooperative (2003); Samuel R. Delany (2004); Blanche Wiesen Cook (2004); Martin Duberman (2006); and Marijane Meaker (2006).
Ann Bannon
Photo by Susan A. Leith
Ann Bannon is known as "The Queen of Pulp Fiction" for the best of all reasons: the author and her books reside in a class by themselves.
"The Beebo Brinker Chronicles," a series of five original paperbacks published by Gold Medal Books from 1957 to 1962, are the most celebrated of our early lesbian novels, and to this day their central character, Beebo Brinker, remains the most iconic figure in all of lesbian fiction.
Reprinted in recent years by Cleis Press with covers faithful to the period of the 50s and 60s, these celebrated tales of young lesbians in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village open with Laura and Beth in a mid-west college in Odd Girl Out (1957); continue in Greenwich Village with I am a Woman (1959) featuring Laura and her volatile relationship with the buccaneering Beebo Brinker; and continue their story in Women in the Shadows (1959). Journey To a Woman (1960) finds Beth seeking out Laura in New York, resulting in a combustive mix of all three major characters. The fifth book, Beebo Brinker (1962), portrays the very young Beebo and acts as a prequel to the four books.
Vividly written and textured with characterization and setting, the stories are charged with energy and color and with passionate heroines from the shy, smoldering Laura to that swashbuckling young butch, Beebo herself, and they include a great portrait of Beebo's gay friend, Jack Mann. With their sensational covers, their coded blurbs (“twilight, strange, shadows, secret, odd, evil, and warped”), the novels were bestsellers, quickly identified and snatched from drugstore shelves by women desperate to find validation of themselves and their sexuality. For an entire generation of lesbians, these stories provided the first representation in literature of women loving women, and in the repressive wasteland of the 50s and 60s, Ann Bannon, through her books, literally saved lives. Without question her five classic novels will remain forever central in the history of lesbian literature.
Now retired from Sacramento State College where she was assistant dean, in recent years Ann Bannon has appeared in film documentaries, radio and television interviews, and in many venues across the country where she speaks in detail about her novels and their times. A New York production written by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda Chapman, based on the Bannon novels and titled (what else?) "The Beebo Brinker Chronicles,” successfully debuted off-Broadway in late 2007 and renewed its run in 2008.
With the books she wrote during a time of war declared on gay and lesbian people, Ann Bannon not only penetrated the isolation and ignorance that kept thousands of lesbians in virtual prisons, she paved the way for the all the generations of lesbian writers who will ever follow her. In every dimension she is one of our greatest pioneers.
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Malcolm Boyd
Photo by Mark Thompson
Malcolm Boyd is the author of 29 books, including the international bestseller Are You Running with Me, Jesus? and his gay coming out classic Take Off the Masks, and editor of five other works. He will celebrate his 85th birthday next June 8 and has been an Episcopal priest for 53 years. Long active in the U.S. literary world, he served three terms as President of PEN Center USA West. He is poet/writer-in-residence at Los Angeles' Episcopal Cathedral Center of St. Paul.
Boyd grew up in Manhattan, attended high school in Denver and went to college in Arizona. In his twenties he worked in Hollywood where he became the production partner of screen legend Mary Pickford in PRB, Inc., produced several pioneer TV shows, and was president of the Television Producers Assn. of Hollywood. He departed in 195l to enter an Episcopal seminary and was ordained a priest in 1955. In 196l Boyd became a "Freedom Rider" in the civil rights movement, marched with Martin Luther King, was arrested inside the Pentagon for leading a "Peace Mass" protesting the Vietnam war, and wrote five short plays on racial themes that were presented throughout the U.S. In 1968-69 he was a Guest Fellow in Calhoun College at Yale University, where he began a long friendship with author Norman Mailer. Boyd joined comedian Dick Gregory for a month of appearances at San Francisco's famed club "the hungry i."
Boyd came out unofficially as a gay man when he wrote the celebrated prayer "This is a homosexual bar, Jesus" in Are You Running with Me, Jesus?. He came out officially and formally in 1977. People magazine described how many had viewed him: "blunt, restless, eloquent and above all, open." Yet it noted the brooding presence of a mask in his public life: "He kept one aspect of his life deeply private: his homosexuality."
He received the 2005 Unitas Award from the Union Theological Seminary in New York and an honorary doctorate from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley. On May 5, 1985, he designed the nation's first AIDS Mass at St. Augustine by-the-Sea church in Santa Monica and was the celebrant. Boyd has been a newspaper and magazine columnist for many of his years. He wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Courier, a national African American newspaper, in the 60s; a column for the Yale Daily News later in that decade; a column for the 34 million readers of the AARP Magazine from 1990 to 2000; and presently a column for Episcopal News. He is a Contributing Writer to White Crane. Boyd and his partner Mark Thompson have lived for more than 20 years in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. |
Mark Thompson
Photo by Jorge Alatorre
 Author-activist Mark Thompson was born and raised on the Monterey Peninsula, California, during the 1950s and '60s. In 1973, Thompson helped found the Gay Students Coalition at San Francisco State University, where he was a journalism student, and has worked for gay causes since that time.
He began his writing career at the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate in 1975, reporting on culture and politics in Europe. Thompson continued to serve the publication during the next two decades in a number of capacities--as a feature writer, photographer, and Senior Editor. In 1994, he completed his tenure at the magazine by editing Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement (St. Martin's Press). The book was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards.
Thompson is best known, however, for his influential trilogy of books dealing with gay spirituality. The first in the series, Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (Lethe Press) was published in 1987. The anthology has been acclaimed around the world and was included on a list compiled by the Lambda Book Report of the "100 Lesbian and Gay Books That Changed Our Lives." The Los Angeles Times called Gay Spirit an "exciting challenge to conventional thinking."
Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature (HarperSan Francisco) followed in 1994. The Lambda Literary Award-nominated book consists of in-depth conversations and photographs with sixteen prominent writers, teachers, and visionaries. "Gay Soul is an outpouring of much-needed love--from new kinds of 'fathers'," commented poet Judy Grahn.
The trilogy was completed in 1997 with the publication of Gay Body: A Journey Through Shadow to Self (St. Martin's Press), an autobiographical memoir combining elements of Jungian archetypes, gay history and mythology, and New Age spirituality. The Washington Post said "the road Thompson travels is fascinating, as he unlocks closets within closets."
In spring 2004, Thompson debuted “Fellow Travelers: Liberation Portraits.” The traveling exhibition features large-scale annotated photos of various artists, writers, and spiritual leaders who have inspired him over the years. “With uncommon sensitivity, Thompson manages to capture the heart and soul of the gay liberation movement by focusing on 14 extraordinary men who redefine what it is to be beautiful,” said noted actor-playwright Michael Kearns. “Thompson’s passionate artistic investment results in valuable documentation that is all at once graceful, insightful, political and lyrical.”
Thompson holds a Master's Degree in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University and works as a counselor to gay youth and people with AIDS. He has been an active participant in many gay community organizations, including ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives (the largest library of its kind in the world), the Monette-Horwitz Trust, and Gay Men’s Medicine Circle, a Los Angeles collective dedicated to the spiritual well being of its community. In May 2002, a prominent Southern California gay and lesbian civic group honored Thompson for his three decades of community service.
Previous Recipients
L. Page "Deacon" Maccubbin, President and CEO of Lambda Rising, Inc. (1995)
Helaine Harris, Daedalus Books (1996)
Ron Hanby, Bookazine (1997)
Katherine V. Forrest (1998)
Astraea Foundation (2001)
Barbara Grier, Naiad Press (2002)
Amazon Bookstore Cooperative (2003)
Samuel R. Delany (2004)
Blanche Wiesen Cook (2004)
Martin Duberman (2006)
Marijane Meaker (2006)
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