S07.04: Trailblazer Meg Cabot
We are so thrilled to have thee Meg Cabot with us, one of the original queens of YA romance. We talk about her longstanding writing career, about the authors who inspired her, about her early historical romances, written as Patricia Cabot, about her pivot into young adult romance and the power of the subgenre, about her own love story, and, of course, about The Princess Diaries of it all. It will surprise absolutely no one that Meg is a delight as a guest--we're so grateful for her time and her insight, and she's welcome back any time.
If you also love romance, maybe you want to join our Patreon, where you get another episode from us each month, and access to the incredible readers and listeners and brilliant people on the Fated Mates discord! Support us and learn more at fatedmates.net/patreon.
Our first read along of Season 7 will be Molly O'Keefe's Everything I Left Unsaid duology, selected by Jen which despite the first book being a cliffhanger should not surprise you because she contains multitudes. The second book is The Truth About Him. Read them both and get ready for Jen to talk to you for hours. You will thank us.
Also! We're back on the phonebanking train this election season! Join us Saturdays between now and Election Day to phonebank with fellow romance lovers. Jen & Sarah are joined by special guests who will knock your socks off! Learn more and register at fatedmates.net/fatedstates. If phonebanking isn't your thing, we're also raising money for downticket house and senate races, because state legislatures may not be sexy, but they sure hold all the power. Learn more, and give what you can at fatedmates.net/givingcircle.
Looking for Sarah's Conflict Writing class? It starts this Sunday--find it right here.
Show Notes
Meg Cabot has written over 50 young adult romances, including The Princess Diaries. Meg also wrote adult romances under the name Patricia Cabot, and her first book Educating Caroline has just been re-released under the name Meg Cabot.
Jen recommends the book Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of 80s and 90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss.
Publishing Professionals and Authors Mentioned: author Barbara Cartland, Jennifer Weis was an agent at St. Martin’s Press and is now at the Weis Agency, editor Amy Pierpont, editor Carrie Ferono, agent Laura Langlie, Sarah Davies with MacMillan in the UK, author Judy Blume, author Michelle Jaffe, author Susan Isaacs, author Susan Elizabeth Phillips, author Bolu Babalola, author Lee Child, publisher Erica Sussman, author PD James.
Books & Movies mentioned: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Romancing the Stone, Daughter of Hassan by Penny Jordan, Anne McCafferey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Blubber by Judy Blume, The Cat Ate my Gymsuit by Paula Danziger, Norma Klein, Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman, Born in Ice by Nora Roberts, In Bed with the Devil by Lorraine Heath.
Books Mentioned This Episode
The Sponsors
Book of the Month, bringing the best new fiction to your door. Go to bookofthemonth.com to pick a book and join. For a limited time, you can get your first book for just $5 with code PUMPKIN. Remember to tell them Fated Mates sent you!
TL Smith, author of When He Reads to Me, available in print and ebook, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, or wherever you get your books.
Claire Therese, author of The Starling Inn, available in print and ebook, or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
Isabella Kamal, author of The Temple of Persephone, available in print and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books or wherever you get your books.
S04.11: Vincent Virga: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Vincent Virga—author of the Gaywyck trilogy, the first m/m gothic romance, and one of the first m/m romances ending with a happily ever after.
He talks about writing gay romance and about the way reading about love and happiness changes readers lives. He also shares rich, wonderful stories about his vibrant life as a picture editor in publishing, about the literary set in New York City in the 70s and 80s, about writing during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, about the times in a writer’s life when the words don’t come easily, and about the times when they can’t be stopped.
We are honored and so grateful that Vincent took the time to speak with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
Welcome Vincent Virga, author of Gaywyck, the first gay gothic romance, and one of the earliest gay romances with a happily ever after. It was published by Avon in 1980. He has written several other novels, including Vadriel Vail and A Comfortable Corner. He was also the premier picture editor in the book industry. He has been with his partner, author James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, for 56 years. Their collected papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Today is the 41st anniversary of The Ramrod Massacre in New York City, where Vernon Kroening and Jorg Wenz were killed. Six other men were shot and injured inside the bar or on the streets near the Ramrod.
Author Malinda Lo and Librarian Angie Manfredi sound the warning bell about the fights that we are facing around access to books and libraries and calls for book banning happening all around the country. Here is what you can do to help support your local library. Check out Runforsomething.net for ideas about local races where you live.
Want more Vincent in your life? Here is a great interview from 2019 on a blog called The Last Bohemians, and this 2011 interview on Live Journal.
Daisy Buchanan cries that she's never seen such beautiful shirts in The Great Gatsby, and We Get Letters is a song from the Perry Como show.
People Vincent mentioned: Susan Sontag, Maria Callas, opera singer Victoria de los Ángeles, editor Elaine Markson, Jane Fonda, Armistead Maupin, poets John Ashbery and James Merrill, Hillary and Bill Clinton, editor Alice Mayhew, Gwen Edelman at Avon Books, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, publisher Bob Wyatt, John Ehrlichman from Watergate, author Colm Tóibín, poet Mark Doty, Truman Capote, poet and translator Richard Howard, Shelley Winters, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Novak.
The museum Vincent was a part of in County Mayo, Ireland, is The Jackie Clarke Collection.
The twisty turny secret book that made him a lover of Gothics was Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Vincent is also a lover of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Bellamann's King's Row.
A few short pieces abaout the AIDS epidemic: the impact of the epidemic on survivors in the queer community, and how the American government ignored the crisis.
A transcript (genrerated by a human!) can be found at the bottom of this page.
Vincent Virga 0:00 / #
Genres have no gender, really. I mean, if you look at them closely the mysteries revolve around behavior and in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself", the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself."
Sarah MacLean 0:43 / #
That was the voice of Vincent Virga, the author of Gaywyck, which is the first modern male/male gothic romance published by Avon in 1980.
Jennifer Prokop 0:53 / #
This is an amazing conversation.
Sarah MacLean 0:56 / #
Oh, it's so good. It's so good.
Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
Every conversation we have had has been so different and so varied, but talking to Vincent, who was really writing a romance kind of outside of the romance community and also outside of the literary community, but deeply rooted in the gay community, makes for a really interesting conversation. He is going to talk about his lifelong relationship with his partner, Jimmy.
Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
Jimmy. Hey Jimmy! We love you.
Jennifer Prokop 1:30 / #
We love Jimmy. We've never met Jimmy but we love Jimmy a lot.
Sarah MacLean 1:34 / #
Look, I have plans. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:35 / #
Yes. He's going to talk about the experience of writing Gaywyck, of living through the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, about life in New York, and learning what it meant to be part of a literary culture that most of America had turned its back on.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Also about what's underneath Hilary Clinton's bed.
Jennifer Prokop 1:55 / #
Vincent's stories are unbelievable. The people he has known, the people he has met, the stories that he's going to tell, but most of all, his commitment to really making a space for queer, young people to see themselves in a happily ever after.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
This one's fabulous. You're going to love it. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 2:24 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Vincent Virga.
Sarah MacLean 2:33 / #
Thank you so much for joining us on Fated Mates.
Vincent Virga 2:37 / #
It's been quite an adventure for me.
Sarah MacLean 2:40 / #
Tell us why.
Vincent Virga 2:41 / #
Because I haven't revisited Gaywyck, actually revisited it, since 2000. When it was reprinted in this edition with a hideous cover by Alyson books.
Jennifer Prokop 2:57 / #
Oh, sure.
Vincent Virga 2:57 / #
And with that edition, I wrote an afterword, explaining how the book happened. And essentially, as I say in that piece, my memory works visually. All of my information is stored in my memory visually. I'm totally visually literate. So basically when I think about the beginning of Gaywyck, where was I when I started it. I see myself, literally I see myself sitting in a house. Big house. On a hill. In Shinnecock. Which is the first town and the beginning of the Hamptons.
Vincent Virga 3:47 / #
Long Island splits at Hampton Bays and the east end begins at Shinnecock. And so I'm sitting in this house on a hill, and the question is, how did I get there? And that's where my partner, Jimmy McCourt comes in. We've been together 56 years. And he basically has flawless recall. So our pal Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, she invented this phrase called "time's relentless melt." That is the history of me.
Jennifer Prokop 4:26 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 4:28 / #
Same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 4:28 / #
It's interesting, isn't it?
Jennifer Prokop 4:29 / #
My best friend is my own memory. I'll call her and be like, "Okay, so how did that happen again?" And she remembers, which is very nice.
Vincent Virga 4:36 / #
Yes. Well, I also would be great for you, because I remember how it happened. But you can't ask me, "When did that happen?" So essentially I walk in and I say, "Jimmy, when did this happen?" I said, "I remember I'm sitting in this house, and you went down to get the mail." And it was high on a hill. So he went down on a bike, and then he was coming up on a bike shouting, shouting at the top of his lungs, "I have a letter from Maria Callas."
Sarah MacLean 5:11 / #
Maria Callas the opera singer?
Sarah MacLean 5:15 / #
Okay. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:15 / #
Maria Callas. And then out he shouted (singing in the style of Maria from West Side Story), "Maria! Maria!" (laughter) Now Jimmy had published, this is 1975, so Jimmy had published his first book, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which got stupendous, stupendous reviews. And basically, it was the first book to be published by New York Review Books of a living author.
Vincent Virga 5:16 / #
And I was sitting on the hill in Shinnecock because I had just been fired by the New York Review of Books. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:44 / #
I was the only person they have ever fired. And they fired me because I had been causing trouble. It's a long story, but I had been causing trouble. So they fired me. A client making some really absurd, absurd claim. However, they paid me unemployment. And so there I was, it was summer. I hate the summer. My whole life after being fired was based on getting out of the city and the heat. In fact, my whole career is freelance. And so I went out, Lenny, a friend of mine, gave us this house. And so there I am, 1975, Jimmy's got his letter from Maria, which was actually a fan letter.
Jennifer Prokop 6:35 / #
She was his fan?
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
Imagine getting a fan letter from Maria Callas!
Vincent Virga 6:39 / #
She was his fan. He adored her. But also, her colleague was Victoria de los Ángeles, one of the great opera singers from that period. And she, she has a great La Bohème and great Madame Butterfly recordings, and basically, Jimmy was 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, his mother took him. They'd been going because a friend had a box, and they would go on Saturday. He was 10. And he was really not very happy with most of the operas, but suddenly, there was the Marriage of Figaro. And there was Victoria de Los Ángeles. And when it was over, Jimmy said to his mother, "I want to meet her." So they went backstage, and this little guy with these big glasses, began to talk to her. And that was the beginning of the most profound friendship. Jimmy and Victoria. And when I joined, and me, we would travel around Europe with her, going to her recitals, going to her performances, being backstage and it was a truly great adventure. And that is basically how we got to Ireland, but that's later. So here I am, on the hill. And at this point you see, I had been, had access to publishing houses because the first chapter of Jimmy's Mawrdew was published in 1971. In the New American Review 13 it was the cover story. And we actually came home from London because Jimmy got a telegram from Ted Solartaroff saying Mawrdew Czgowchwz dazzling. So we came home and I went with him and we met the team at Simon and Schuster.
Sarah MacLean 6:47 / #
This is like the good old days of publishing.
Jennifer Prokop 7:40 / #
I know.
Sarah MacLean 7:48 / #
Get a telegram.
Vincent Virga 7:53 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 7:54 / #
Fly home to New York to meet Simon and Schuster.
Vincent Virga 8:16 / #
That's exactly right. And we met Ted Solartaroff.
Sarah MacLean 8:26 / #
Vincent, in my life, I have never seen a telegram from my publisher, and I object. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 8:46 / #
Actually, Jimmy received that one and Jane Fonda, when I was working with her on her books, I was a picture editor, she would send me telegrams.
Sarah MacLean 8:55 / #
It was so civilized.
Vincent Virga 8:56 / #
It was absolutely tops civilized and so thrilling! I mean there we were zooming home for New American Review. And then the book was sold by Jimmy's agent, Elaine Markson, to Simon and Schuster. And while I was there I met the team, as I said, Rhoma Mostel and Gypsy Da Silva. Now, this is important, because Simon and Schuster at that point was publishing all of these gothic romances and I said to them -
Sarah MacLean 9:30 / #
Wait, I'm gonna stop.
Sarah MacLean 9:31 / #
At this point were you reading these gothic romances? Or were they just sort of -
Vincent Virga 9:35 / #
I loved the form, but I was not reading the the new ones. My gothic romance is what Jane Eyre -
Jennifer Prokop 9:43 / #
Frankenstein.
Vincent Virga 9:44 / #
Wuthering Heights. Frankenstein. Absolutely! And also Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.
Vincent Virga 9:51 / #
The secret in Wilkie Collins, I used to say, it's worth killing for. I would kill if that were my secret. So that when I was completing Gaywyck, I kept writing new endings until I had an ending, a secret that I would kill for.
Sarah MacLean 10:10 / #
Ohhh! That's great!
Vincent Virga 10:10 / #
There are basically three endings to Gaywyck.
Sarah MacLean 10:14 / #
Okay. Because that really is the cornerstone of the good Gothic, that there is a twist at the end. There's a -
Vincent Virga 10:21 / #
A real -
Sarah MacLean 10:22 / #
And you don't see it coming.
Vincent Virga 10:24 / #
Absolutely. So I began reading them. I would send them to my mother. And once I was out there, and I picked up, I think it was Cashelmara, or it was one of them, a mega bestseller! And I'm reading this puppy, and all of a sudden I discovered that the secret wasn't a crazy wife in the attic. (laughter) The secret was actually, the secret was the husband was a closet faggot. That was the secret. So the wife would swoon, faint, and then she would fall into the arms of her best friend who would say, "I never liked that guy." And so that's how they ended. And that, that became a form.
Sarah MacLean 11:20 / #
So that became a secret that you saw many times, over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:24 / #
Over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:25 / #
And I couldn't believe it! I thought this is totally unacceptable! And meanwhile my mother's reading this and meanwhile I'm living with Jimmy. And I'm thinking to myself, this is absolutely hideous. And at that point, I had not come out.
Sarah MacLean 11:40 / #
Vincent, I want to come back to that, but also, can you give us a sense of time at this point? What year are we in?
Vincent Virga 11:45 / #
We're in 1972 when New American Review 1973 -
Jennifer Prokop 11:51 / #
That's when I was born, Vincent. I just want to - (laughter) You know what, because I'm usually the oldest person on these calls. So I just want to enjoy being like, I'm the young one now. I'm the young one.
Vincent Virga 12:01 / #
Yes, yes. I just joined 79 and Jimmy just joined 80.
Sarah MacLean 12:05 / #
So this is the mid '70s, and Jen has just been born, which is the most important part of that! (laughter) You were saying you had not come out yet.
Vincent Virga 12:15 / #
I had not come out! I would visit my mother and my father and they would say to me, "Who's watching the cat?"
Vincent Virga 12:21 / #
I would say, "I live with Jimmy." And I kept saying that we met in 1964 at Yale Graduate School and basically, "I'm living with Jimmy!" And they would look at me and nod, and they never computed. So basically I thought, "I have to deal with this at some point." And I'm reading these books and my hair is on fire. I'm thinking this is disgusting! So there I am, in the house on the hill, and I'm reading Lolita. I'm reading Lolita and I thought to myself, "This could be a boy." And then the next thought was, "If Shakespeare had a sister, why can't Jane Eyre have a brother, John? And that was the point when I thought genres have no gender, really.
Jennifer Prokop 13:19 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 13:20 / #
I mean if you look at them closely, the mysteries revolve around behavior. And in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself" the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself." So basically that became the basis of this, and also the other basis was Rochester has to go blind in order to see the truth. I began to think about my boy, my narrator, and it all sort of came together pretty fast. Too fast. Because I settled in and I began to write very quickly. Now I don't how to write a novel. I never knew how to write a novel, but I knew what novels were. I had been reading them since I was very, very young. I started reading when I was five and basically, I started reading stories. And then in grammar school I was reading novels. I was reading Dickens. And I remember in the 10th grade, Miss Marsh, was a genius of a teacher, she assigned Jane Eyre. And then she assigned Vanity Fair, which I adored. But while other kids in my class were bored, I went on to read all of Brontë. And I went on to read all of Thackeray. And so when I later discovered Wilkie Collins, I read all of Wilkie Collins. And essentially that's a lot of books. And the same with Dickens. And so when I realized that I wanted to write a book, I said to Jimmy, "I think I want to write a book." And Jimmy said to me, "What took you so long?"
Jennifer Prokop 15:44 / #
Awww. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 15:45 / #
What a good dude! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 15:47 / #
What took you so long? And also, we had a joke. VIrginia Woolf said, "You shouldn't start writing until you're 33." I was 33.
Vincent Virga 15:56 / #
It was perfect. I mean, the gods were all ordaining this.
Jennifer Prokop 15:59 / #
Did you read pulp? Was there fiction that featured gay characters at all? Or were you really steeped in these classics?
Vincent Virga 16:07 / #
I was steeped in the classics. And when, and remember now, we're talking 1970, and so I was pretty much reading the classics. And also, I'd never been to a gay bar. I mean I met Jimmy in New Haven, and I never went to a gay bar. And so basically I was reading the classics. And in fact, I wanted to become an academic. And Jimmy wanted to become an academic. Actually, he was in a PhD program at NYU, which he thought was, "This, this is the end of my life! This is so boring!" And so he announced that he was leaving NYU, that he was going to Yale Graduate School of Drama to find a husband. (laughter) That's what he told all of his friends. That was the reason he went to Yale. And so -
Sarah MacLean 17:00 / #
And it worked! And look at this!
Vincent Virga 17:02 / #
It did work! He also brought, in the beginning of the term, all of his gay friends from Manhattan. So basically, it was a total revelation to me. These queens were swanning around and they were laughing. They were all opera mavens,, and they would sit down at the piano and make up operas and it was a whole other realm for me. And so no, I didn't read pulps, I mean, I read Dragonwyck. I also must tell you my mother's, when she was young, she worked in publishing at Macmillan. So the house in Manhattan, and then the house, the apartment in Manhattan, and the house on Long Island was floor-to-ceiling books. And they were all bestsellers. So there were things like, you know, Kings Row, which in fact, I've just re-read. I love those mega best sellers!
Sarah MacLean 18:02 / #
That's the thing, right? Those mega best sellers feel - there's a reason why they are best sellers.
Vincent Virga 18:08 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 18:08 / #
They appeal to a really intense of storytelling that we all have.
Vincent Virga 18:14 / #
Absolutely. So there I am, you know, reading Thackeray, and when I was in college, my professor assigned Clarissa.
Vincent Virga 18:26 / #
Clarissa. And so I went to the bookstore, and there was this tiny paperback called Clarissa, and also, it had in big letters on the back, "Abridged." And I remember thinking, "I don't think so." (laughter) So I went to the library, and I said to the librarian, who knew me at that point, and I said to the librarian, "I have to read Clarissa. I want to read the whole thing. Do you have the whole thing?" And he went into the back, and he came back carrying these three tomes.
Sarah MacLean 18:58 / #
Giant books! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 18:59 / #
The three volumes of Clarissa. And he said to me, "No one has checked this book out -
Sarah MacLean 19:07 / #
(laughing) No one has ever read -
Vincent Virga 19:08 / #
"For 100 years. This book has been here for 100 years, and no one has ever read the whole thing." So that basically tells you, you know, what I was like with my reading. And I think that's why I said in the beginning, "I don't know how to write novels, but I know what they are" So that when I read them -
Sarah MacLean 19:31 / #
The instinct is hardwired.
Vincent Virga 19:32 / #
Hardwired, not only with Clarissa, but also with Kings Row.
Sarah MacLean 19:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Vincent Virga 19:37 / #
You know, and the whole idea of telling a story, and also I grew up in the movies, essentially. I mean, I was, I think I was four when I was taken to the Wizard of Oz. And so the movies, I became obsessed with the movies and I grew up literally in the movies.
Vincent Virga 19:57 / #
The narrative, visual narrative, and of course now when I look back, I realized that it was helping me develop my visual sensibility.
Vincent Virga 20:07 / #
And as Gaywyck, the first draft, I put it aside and I'm thinking, "Oy. I have to let this sit." And so I started a novel called The Comfortable Corner. And I started writing The Comfortable Corner, and I actually, over the next, I think, two years, completed the first draft of that and then I went back to Gaywyck, and I did the second and third draft of Gaywyck, but I must tell you, from the beginning, I knew that it was a game. I knew. I knew that I was going to take lines from the great novels and the great movies.
Sarah MacLean 20:48 / #
Am I wrong in thinking that it begins with this echo of Rebecca? Like, "Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley again."
Vincent Virga 20:54 / #
That's right, exactly. Exactly. So the game begins. I, throughout the book, at one point, when he has all of these, he gets all of these clothes from Donna, when he picks up all these shirts, and he says, "I've never seen so many beautiful shirts." That's probably the most famous one. That's also a key, it gives things away. And at one point, he says, "No one's ever called me "Darling" before." And that's Bette Davis and Now, Voyagers. So there are dozens of them.
Sarah MacLean 21:21 / #
I love that. I mean and that's why it's so appealing because when you think about the great romance novels, there is something that echoes media and pop culture and -
Vincent Virga 21:31 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:32 / #
And culture writ large.
Vincent Virga 21:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:33 / #
And that's why we love, we did a whole episode on retellings of Fated Mates and -
Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
There's such an appeal to retellings because we know the story, and also we like the game, as you call it.
Vincent Virga 21:45 / #
Yes, it's the game, and I think when the book came out and was reviewed by Armistead Maupin, he said, he goes on and on with such delight, the tone is perfect, and the last line is, "I wonder if Robert and Donough saw Judy at Carnegie Hall?" (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 22:06 / #
Perfect! Ohhh! Did you frame it on your wall?
Vincent Virga 22:08 / #
And then he says, "Read the son of a bitch."
Jennifer Prokop 22:12 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:13 / #
"You'll love it!"
Vincent Virga 22:14 / #
And that became the key word. And when I was re-reading it now, I though of Armistead and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I get it." I really like this book.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Yeah, it's really fun!
Vincent Virga 22:28 / #
I really like this book!
Jennifer Prokop 22:29 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:29 / #
And I read the son of a bitch! (laughter) And I loved it!
Vincent Virga 22:34 / #
So essentially, I'm here today with this sense of celebration. And it's delightful to me that I'm now getting all of these, I'm getting all these fan emails from people of all ages again. And there's a question you ask, and I want to tell you, first of all, I had no community. None.
Sarah MacLean 23:02 / #
And that is the thing that we talk about, is the question that we ask all the time, who was your community? So -
Vincent Virga 23:07 / #
I had no community as a writer. None. Also, Jimmy's success, you know, he was published by Knopf, his books got fabulous reviews. And it brought me into a very high voltage literary community in Manhattan. And I, when Gaywyck was published, I didn't really care. I did my job, and it got wonderful reviews, and people were reading it, but that community, that community, it became their dirty secret.
Sarah MacLean 23:43 / #
Very familiar.
Vincent Virga 23:44 / #
So I would go to these events and John Ashbery would come up to me and tell me, "I love your book." And I remember Tim Duclos calling me over and saying (in a whisper), "I love your book. It really shocks me how much I love your book."
Sarah MacLean 23:59 / #
Oh, that's my favorite. "It shocks me. I couldn't believe it was good." (laughter)
Vincent Virga 24:02 / #
No, they couldn't believe it, and it was this game. And there I was, and I remember being at a party at James Merrill's house and him saying, "My nephew says Gaywyck saved his life. He was in the most profound despair and he read Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 24:23 / #
So before we go much further down this, people reading the book, can we talk a little bit about how the book came to be?
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
It's written. You've edited it. Where does it go from there?
Vincent Virga 24:34 / #
No, no.
Vincent Virga 24:35 / #
No, no. I wrote it, and Jimmy's editor, Elaine Markson, read it and loved it. And she said to me, "I will sell this book. This is unique. It's actually beautifully written. And I love this book!" So she sent it around. She sent it to Knopf. She sent it to all her friends and it was rejected. Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. She gathered 35 rejections. At this point I had this huge career in publishing as a picture person. Eventually, I'm the only person who ever researched, edited, designed and cached picture sections. The last couple of books I did were by the Clintons. I did Hillary's book, Bill's book. I've got an eight page resume, 163 books, right. So this is also going on, and my mentor is Michael Korda, who is the head of publishing at Simon and Schuster, and Elaine sent it to everybody. Everybody.
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
Were the rejections because it was happily ever after? Was it because it was Gothic? Was because it was gay?
Vincent Virga 25:43 / #
I think it was gay, and no one could cope with it. They couldn't figure out what was I doing defiling this genre that was making fortunes for them. And meanwhile, I'm taking the villain and making him the hero?
Sarah MacLean 25:59 / #
I love it!
Vincent Virga 26:00 / #
So essentially -
Jennifer Prokop 26:01 / #
What are you? Milton?
Vincent Virga 26:03 / #
Exactly! And they could not cope. So Simon and Schuster, I worked with all of them, and one of the great divas was named Alice Mayhew. She did the Woodward Bernstein books. I mean, she was the great diva of the political book. I did many, many books with her. Her assistant was a woman named Gwen Edelman. okay? When Gwen left Alice, she went to Avon books.
Sarah MacLean 26:33 / #
To this point, Avon books is not a part of HarperCollins. It's a pulp publisher.
Vincent Virga 26:39 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:39 / #
And they do mass market reprints and pulp fiction -
Vincent Virga 26:43 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:43 / #
And just for the last few years, have been doing paperback originals like -
Sarah MacLean 26:50 / #
Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss.
Sarah MacLean 26:53 / #
And those kind of big romance names.
Vincent Virga 26:56 / #
Yes, all the romances. So I sent it to Gwen, and she called me and she said, "I love this, but I can't publish this book." And I remembered Gwen was a friend, when we were in East Hampton, where we went every summer to get away from the heat. And it was also East Hampton BC: East Hampton before computers.
Sarah MacLean 27:24 / #
No helicopters flying back.
Vincent Virga 27:26 / #
No. Absolutely. And Gwen's daddy, owned what we in the romance novel realm would call, "an estate."
Sarah MacLean 27:37 / #
(laughter) I'm for it.
Vincent Virga 27:38 / #
So essentially, and we were on different sides of the highway. He was south of the highway. I was north of the highway, but my neighbor -
Sarah MacLean 27:47 / #
East egg and West Egg,
Jennifer Prokop 27:49 / #
Yeah, right! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 27:49 / #
Right. And my neighbor was Gwen Verdon, whom I worshipped! I mean the first musical I ever saw as a kid was Redhead, she and Bob Fosse. And she was my neighbor. So basically, it was, that was East Hampton, you know. So Gwen came to see me, and she sat down, and she said to me, "I have to tell you, I really love this book. And I'm so sorry, I can't publish it." And I said, "Why can't you publish it?" And Gwen said to me, "Gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 28:22 / #
Why wouldn't you know that, Vincent? (laughter)
Vincent Virga 28:25 / #
Gay people don't want romance and obviously I wouldn't know that because I wrote this book called Gaywyck. And had I known that I wouldn't have written that book. And it was also one of the reasons it had been rejected by everybody. Gay people don't want romance.
Sarah MacLean 28:37 / #
What nonsense!
Vincent Virga 28:38 / #
I said to Gwen, "Gwennie, you've known me and Jimmy for years. Years! You know, you know our lives. You've been with us at parties. You've been with us at dinner. You know, you know our lives, Gwen. In fact, you even know I came out in Paris. What is more romantic than coming out in Paris?"
Jennifer Prokop 29:03 / #
Nothing.
Vincent Virga 29:04 / #
So she said to me, "I live over a leather bar in the West Village." And she said to me, "I know gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 29:15 / #
Because of the leather bar in the West Village?
Vincent Virga 29:17 / #
The leather bar. Because she's in the West Village and all she saw -
Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
That's the source she's citing.
Vincent Virga 29:22 / #
She only saw cruising. She only saw New York City in that period of time. Pre AIDS and she only saw that. That's all that she knew about the gay community. So basically I said, "Gwen, look at Jimmy and me as I said." And she said, "Right." So she went back and she presented the book to Bob Wyatt, who is gay. (laughter) He was the publisher. And so he loved it! And so they said, "Yes, they loved it." They loved it. The only caveat they had was I had to change the title. [AD BREAK]
Sarah MacLean 30:07 / #
So the original title was Gaywyck? Or -
Sarah MacLean 30:51 / #
Gaywyck. They said, "You have to change the title." And I said, "But it's a game, you know. Dragonwyck. It's a game. This is all part of the game." "No, no, no no. We want something more in the romantic line."
Jennifer Prokop 32:00 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 32:01 / #
So I started. I started making these lists of romantic titles and when our papers went to Yale, to the Beinecke Library, I scooped up everything that had to do with Gaywyck, all the different drafts, everything. And that list is there.
Jennifer Prokop 32:16 / #
Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 32:17 / #
You've got to get it back!
Vincent Virga 32:19 / #
I wish I could remember what they were.
Sarah MacLean 32:21 / #
Attention Yale University. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 32:24 / #
When I was reading, someone, two summers ago, someone got a scholarship to go work with Jimmy's papers at Yale for his PhD. And he also went through my diaries because they're all there. Everything is there. Jimmy still shocked by everything. It was the perfect way to clean out in New York City apartment. And my sister's -
Jennifer Prokop 32:45 / #
(laughing) You're like, "Yale, would you like my things?"
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
(laughing) "Do you want my paper?"
Vincent Virga 32:48 / #
Everything went to Yale. Every single thing. And so I tried and I tried, meanwhile thinking, "Ugh, I can't bear changing the title of this book. I just can't bear it." And so then they created the cover.
Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
Which is -
Vincent Virga 33:02 / #
And of course the cover -
Sarah MacLean 33:03 / #
It's stunning!
Vincent Virga 33:04 / #
It's flawless! Stunning!
Sarah MacLean 33:06 / #
It's stunning. The first time I ever saw it I gasped out loud.
Vincent Virga 33:09 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 33:09 / #
And then I called Avon and I was like, "How do I get a copy of this?" The answer was, "You can't have one." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
That's fine.
Vincent Virga 33:19 / #
It's intriguing, intriguing, intriguing, because people, when they got out into the bookstores, it was mistaken for a straight romantic novel.
Jennifer Prokop 33:29 / #
Ohhh.
Sarah MacLean 33:29 / #
Because it looks just like all the other gothics, which is how it should look.
Vincent Virga 33:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 33:33 / #
It's how it should look. House on the hill. Brooding men.
Vincent Virga 33:36 / #
And at first glance - Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 33:39 / #
Crashing waves.
Vincent Virga 33:40 / #
Right! It was perfect. I loved it. And so out it went into the world. And then bookstores started to put warnings on it.
Vincent Virga 33:49 / #
Saying you need to know this is a gay gothic, a gay romance. And one of my clients, my picture editing clients, at that point was John Ehrlichman from the Watergate years. And I loved him. And I would come home and say things to Jimmy like, "Oh god, John Ehrlichman is a sweetie!" And Jimmy would say, "Get a grip!" And so basically -
Sarah MacLean 34:15 / #
(laughing) John Ehrlichman, about to go to jail!
Vincent Virga 34:17 / #
Actually, yes! And what happened was when I read his manuscript, he went to jail! And when I read his manuscript and said, "John, you told me everything, but you don't tell me why you went to jail." And so he wrote a chapter Why I Went to Jail. So he and I became really good friends. And he read Gaywyck, and he loved it. And when he went out on the road, he would call me and he would say, "I'm in Oklahoma. I'm in Mississippi. I'm in bookstores selling my book, and I'm asking them why they don't have Gaywyck, and many of them do have Gaywyck." And then he went to Texas, and he called me and he said, "I was just in a bookstore in Texas, and that that bookstore has a bullet hole in the window, which was put into Gaywyck!"
Sarah MacLean 34:59 / #
(gasps)
Jennifer Prokop 35:00 / #
Hmm. Wow.
Vincent Virga 35:02 / #
We mustn't forget this.
Jennifer Prokop 35:04 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 35:05 / #
Mustn't forget this. The night of my party, my Gaywyck party in 1980 November, was the night of the Ramrod Massacre. And I know it happened because we were at my party at Lane's West Village apartment and we heard gunshots.
Vincent Virga 35:24 / #
And then we heard police. So we must not ever forget this. And then I went out on my tour. And I was, I was invited to meet the editor. He was Brent Harris. He loved the book. I went to see him, but before I got in the house, I got a phone call, telling me he was very sick. He was dying. And he was, in fact, I would be the last person he would be seeing before he went into this hospice. And when I got there, he loved the book and he loved Mawrdew. And so we were talking about that, he loved Callas, he loved Victoria. And we got all engaged with all of this stuff. So my short visit became hours. And while we were talking, his friends were packing up his apartment, because he was being moved out. And he was one of the first, he said, "I know of five of us. They're calling it the gay cancer. They don't know what it is yet, but there's this thing happening." We mustn't forget that either, because I - this is difficult. One of my best friends is Colm Tóibín. I've read all of his books. I met him when we were both young in Dublin. And he wrote a book called The Story of the Night, which I never read because it was about AIDS. When Gaywyck came out, and then two years later, it was followed by A Comfortable Corner, which is a book about recovery from alcoholism, written from the point of view of the other, used to be called the codependent. And basically those books were picked up all over the place. They were picked up by the 12 Step groups, they were picked up by the gay men, all over the place. And then, then I started getting invited to the hospital. And Jimmy was invited to the hospital. He could go. I could go, but I would faint. Literally, I would faint. And I was in analysis at that point. I had given myself analysis for my 40th birthday. And Jimmy always said to me, "Oh, you'll just love this. You get to talk all about yourself." And so my analyst said to me when I said I'm, "I'm fainting." He said to me, "You're having the correct response." So I realized this was a problem. And I couldn't go to wakes either, but I was invited because of the books, because the men loved the books. And so I went. I did the best that I could. And basically I couldn't write. The reason there's such a gap between Gaywyck and A Comfortable Corner and Vadriel Vale was because I actually suffered from what we now recognize as PTSD. It was, it was PTSD-ville. That's all I can say. And lost so many friends. And when years later when I met, when I met my friend, Mark Doty. When I met my friend Mark Doty for the first time, he said to me, "When my partner was dying, in Provincetown, we would read your books over and over." And so then also, when I was doing Capote with Gerald Clarke, he said to me, "Truman reads your book aloud every Christmas."
Sarah MacLean 39:46 / #
Oh my god.
Vincent Virga 39:47 / #
So there was that going on.
Sarah MacLean 39:50 / #
And you're also you're getting telephone calls in the middle of the night.
Vincent Virga 39:54 / #
I am getting, yes to telephone calls, and the most stunning, remember now the year, so I was still in the phonebook.
Jennifer Prokop 40:03 / #
Sure.
Vincent Virga 40:03 / #
And I would get, I would get telephone calls.
Sarah MacLean 40:06 / #
Phonebook! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 40:08 / #
Imagine? Phone? I actually had someone come to my apartment, this kid, and I still have a black hanging phone because I love it as a souvenir. And the kid said to me, "What's that?"
Sarah MacLean 40:16 / #
What's that?
Jennifer Prokop 40:17 / #
Oh, yeah. I teach middle schoolers and a kid was like how? And another kid was like you put your finger in and you -
Vincent Virga 40:25 / #
Yes, yes, yes. So the phone rang in the middle of the night. And it's this young boy calling me from the Midwest because he had read Gaywyck and he had been going to kill himself. He was going to shoot himself. He was in love with his gym teacher. And he said to me, "I found Gaywyck. I found it in the A&P." Because of that cover! Because it had been stacked in all of these places. So he found it. And he said to me, "Is it true that men can be together?" And I said, "I'm together. I'm together with Jimmy." We've been together since 1964 and we're very together. And we have a completely together relationship, and it's also exclusive. We never opened it. It's been exclusive for 56 years for me. And so I said, "Of course, yes, it is." And then I said to him, "If ever you need to talk about this, if ever you get frightened, call me." And he said to me, "I won't have to call you. I just have to re-read Gaywyck." I -
Sarah MacLean 41:45 / #
(laughs) I'm a mess.
Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
I know. I'm fine.
Vincent Virga 41:48 / #
And so AIDS hits and I am paralyzed. And I mean, paralyzed. And I was paralyzed. So what happened then was my career just became huge. Huge. I was, I became literally America's foremost picture editor.
Jennifer Prokop 42:09 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 42:09 / #
Michael Korda christenened me the Michelangelo of picture editors. So I was all over the place. And Jimmy's editor at Farrar, Straus said, "Oh, dear. Hair by Kenneth. Pictures by Vincent." And meanwhile, I'm going to these posh events, and all of these people are coming up to me and saying, (in a whisper) "I love your book. I love your book." They'll never talk about it. And I said, you know, I would say to Jimmy, "I don't give a shit. I did what I did. I achieved what I did. I'm proud of the book. I don't care if they like it or not." And Jimmy said, "That makes it more difficult for them. Really makes it more difficult for them. So I would go to all the parties and inevitably one of them, some mega star would come up to me and say, (in a whisper) "I love your book." And that became a joke that Jimmy and I had.
Sarah MacLean 43:10 / #
You kept a list on the fridge.
Jennifer Prokop 43:11 / #
Yeah, right.
Vincent Virga 43:12 / #
Love your book! I can't tell you. And then my mother and father, we're sitting having lunch, and they are listening to the radio, and they begin fiddling on the dial and all of a sudden, they discover NPR, with bells ringing, and bats screeching and scary music. And the announcer says, "Our guest today is Vincent Virga, the author of the first gay, Gothic."
Sarah MacLean 43:47 / #
And so at this point, to be clear, you have not come out to your parents.
Sarah MacLean 43:52 / #
And your parents don't know that you've written a book.
Sarah MacLean 43:56 / #
But you did write it under your actual name.
Vincent Virga 44:00 / #
In fact, I wrote it under my actual name.
Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
This is amazing.
Vincent Virga 44:03 / #
And my youngest brother, who is today a devoted Trumpster said to my oldest sister, "I have to change my name. I have to change my name. How can I go to school with this?" And meanwhile my sister is giving it to all of her friends and my middle brother was a deacon of the church, upstate New York. They spoke out against homosexuality. So when Gaywyck was published, my brother bought the number of copies that he needed and gave one as a Christmas present to each deacon, and resigned from the church. So that's my brother and my other brother saying "I have to change my name."
Sarah MacLean 44:42 / #
Love that story too! So your parents stumbled upon NPR -
Jennifer Prokop 44:46 / #
Outed by NPR seems like a very niche way to come out, (laughter) you know.
Vincent Virga 44:52 / #
My parents also, they never listen to NPR! They were probably looking for some talk show. Some dish show that they could have over lunch. So I went out the next weekend.
Sarah MacLean 45:06 / #
So they said nothing, or did they summon you?
Vincent Virga 45:09 / #
No. They said nothing, nothing, nothing. And I didn't even know they'd heard it. Nothing. So we go to Abraham and Straus, which is a huge supermarket, a department store in a mall, where I had worked as a kid. That's where I worked as a kid, for all of those years, between college and between Yale. In fact, the year between Yale, I was actually reviving trout, because they had built this huge trout field, you paid $5, and you went shipping, but the trout were coming up in the heat. So my job was wearing pit boots and reviving trout. (laughter) So we went to A&S and we're going up the escalator and there is a banner over the bookstore that says, "Gaywyck! Vincent Virga." And I say, "Oh, my God, look at that." And my parents ignored it.
Sarah MacLean 46:04 / #
Like it didn't exist,
Vincent Virga 46:05 / #
Didn't exist. Didn't exist. I finally at one point, soon after that, they said to me, something like, "Who's minding the cat?" And I said, "Jimmy. I live with Jimmy. I've been living with Jimmy, and basically, I wrote a book called Gaywyck." And that's when they admitted hearing it on NPR. That's when they talked about the banner. My mother read it. And she said to me, "I thought there was too much sex."
Sarah MacLean 46:33 / #
My mother said the same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 46:36 / #
I said, "How could you tell? It's written in all of that prose, that Victorian prose. It's buried in the prose." I said, "How could you tell? It means, aha, that you've been reading those books I'm sending you. You've been reading those romances." And then basically, I went to sleep.
Sarah MacLean 46:58 / #
So now is this happening because Avon is just behind this book?
Vincent Virga 47:04 / #
Avon was behind it, but actually, the world was behind it.
Sarah MacLean 47:11 / #
That's great.
Vincent Virga 47:11 / #
Armistead Maupin was behind it. It was time. It was time. And so Richard Howard, who's a great poet and translator, he tells me the story that he was driving across the United States with his partner, and they were listening to NPR. And all of a sudden, this thing appeared. The bells chiming, and there I am! And the two of them started screaming at top of their voice with joy. Years later, I picked up, I'm still constantly reading right, and I picked up Madame de La Fayette The Princesse De Cleves, which is considered the first French psychological novel. It's about a woman, an aristocratic woman, who marries an aristocratic man, and then falls, she falls in love with another man. She falls in love with this man, and in Roman Catholic fashion, she has a nervous breakdown, she's hysterical, and basically, at the end of the book, she goes into a convent and dies. So I thought to myself, "You know, what? Why couldn't a man fall in love with a woman and marry her? And then fall in love with an aristocratic man?" Why can't, since I took the John reform, why can't I take the psychological novel? And so I flipped it around, of course, we meet Vadriel Vale in a monastery, which he leaves for various reasons to go out into the world to actually discover himself. And he discovers himself, he marries this wonderful woman, and he falls in love with Armand de Guise. Now the name Armand de Guise is actually a name that's in The Princesse De Cleves. And I plot that book, along the lines of The Princesse de Cleves, but I hook it into Robert and Donough Gaylord. I make Robert and Donough Armand's best friend.
Sarah MacLean 49:27 / #
Ahh! Perfect! Series, a series is born!
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
And they also live across from each other in Gramercy Park and when I wrote Gaywyck, the first draft, I was the superintendent of the building on Gramercy Park. A little building. I was the super under a fake name, because it was a rent stabilized apartment, and Jimmy and I needed a place to live and we were walking down the street, we bumped into our pal from Yale, Bob Landorff, and he said to me, "I'm getting married and I have this tiny studio apartment at Irving Place. Do you know anybody who wants it?" And I said, "Yeah, we want it." And he said, "But you have to be Bob Landorff." And I said, "Okay. That's fine."
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
This is the most New York thing I've ever - I mean, everybody does it.
Vincent Virga 50:08 / #
Then the landlord came because he needed a new super, and I answered the door as Bob Landorff, and Jimmy was in the bathtub. So in comes the super and he sits down, and he says to me, "Will you be the super of the building?" And I said, "I can't do anything!" "No, no, no, no. All you have to do is wash down the halls, sort the trash, and when anything goes wrong, you just call somebody." So we talked and talked and talked, and then he got up and he said, "Okay, it's a deal. Free rent." I said, "No, no, no. No free rent." I'm thinking, "Free rent. He's gonna find out I'm -"
Jennifer Prokop 50:41 / #
You're not Bob Landorff!
Vincent Virga 50:42 / #
I'm not Bob Landorff and I'm out the window! So basically, I said, "No, no, no." So he said, "I have to go to the bathroom." So we went into the bathroom, and there is Jimmy in the bathtub, and the landlord pees and then he leaves and Jimmy is freezing in the bathtub and I said, "Just think here we are with the frozen rent and I'm now the super." So basically, it's on Irving Place, and on the corner of Irving Place and Gramercy Park -
Sarah MacLean 51:12 / #
Which is one of the most beautiful places in the city! For those of you who are not New Yorkers, it's gorgeous, that block.
Vincent Virga 51:19 / #
Gorgeous. Yeah. And that's where Robert, that's where Robert and Donough, on the corner.
Sarah MacLean 51:25 / #
Perfect.
Vincent Virga 51:25 / #
And across the park, I then moved to 22nd Street and Lexington, around the corner from Gramercy Park. And Armand and Vadriel live on the other corner. So for me, they are, that's where they live, and that's where they'll always live.
Jennifer Prokop 51:46 / #
So what year was this? I mean, clearly, you were still doing picture editing and still had that whole outlet for your creativity, but writing novels was a little different, right?
Vincent Virga 51:58 / #
Yes. And I only wrote in the summers.
Jennifer Prokop 52:00 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Vincent Virga 52:00 / #
Because I discovered that I couldn't do, I couldn't do both. I could research in the winter. I could do some re-writing in the winter, but I was doing these mega best selling books. And I mean, I was working with these, you know, I was working with the President of the United States. And I was working with Jane Fonda, whom I love and all of these wonderful people on these mega books. And that took a lot of time. And also, if I'm doing your book, I read your manuscript, I then make a list of everything I want to see, and then I meet with you, and I go through your sock drawer. (laughter) And we wander through what's under your bed. Shelley Winters had these incredible pictures under her bed. And so that's what I do. I enter your life. With Hillary and Bill Clinton, I entered their lives, and I moved into the house. And it's hard to write fiction when you've got this mishegoss going on. (laughter) Impossible. And so I would write in the summer. So always the summer. For decades it was East Hampton until East Hampton became too expensive. Then it was one summer in Woodstock, which I hated. All these rich people pretending to be poor. And they were also too many mosquitoes! And so as the gods would have it, Victoria was giving a performance in Dublin and Jimmy traveled all over the British Isles with her and then they went to Dublin and a woman who was in control of this whole creative project fell in love with Jimmy and said, "You should come and spend summers in Ireland." So that's how we got to Ireland. We spent four years in Dublin, that's where I met Colm Tóibín. And then we went out to the west of Ireland, County Mayo, and I actually created a museum out there. Co-founded a museum in the west coast of Ireland, in Ballina. And then I would have, we would come back to New York, and then I got a call from the Library of Congress asking me, my very first book, my very first book was for John Wayne. And it was 12 songs. Michael gave me 12 songs and said, "You have to make a book out of this. You're a picture editor, right?" And I lied, and I said, "Sure!" Thinking, "How hard could it be?" So one of the tenants in my building was Agnes Maya, who was in charge of all the picture research at Simon and Schuster at Random House. And I said, "Agnes." She says to me, "You can't do that. I couldn't do that." So she gave me a copy of picture sources, and I kept playing the songs over and over again, and thinking to myself, "Oh my god, this is such a hoot! It's such America. It's all about America!" So I called the Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and the Air Force and I said, "Listen, I'm working on a project with John Wayne. Can I come and go through your files? And they said, "John Wayne? Sure."
Vincent Virga 53:10 / #
For him anything. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 54:55 / #
Anything! And also, and this is my first book, so I don't even know you're supposed to pay people. And then I thought to myself, all those pretty pictures of America, all of those advertisements for Oldsmobile and Ford. And so I started calling the mega companies and saying, "Listen, all those beautiful pictures of America." And they said, "We don't - no one can have them." And I said, "Well, I'm doing a book for John Wayne."
Sarah MacLean 55:24 / #
(laughter) Oh, John Wayne!
Vincent Virga 55:26 / #
And I will give you a credit. I'll give you a credit in a book by John Wayne called America, Why I Love Her. And then I thought, "I need more." So I thought to myself, you know, all those Farm Security Administration pictures, Dorothea Lange, all those people I love, they're very America. So I went to the Library of Congress, and the curator I met, became the head curator, 15 years later, of prints and photographs. And so they called me and said, "We need to do a book. We're having a major anniversary, 100 years. All of the curators have been working in their different divisions. We need a book. What do you think we should do?" And I said, "We need to do a book about a history." And I called it Eyes of the Nation, because that's what the Library of Congress is. And also the Library of Congress is America's memory. So I said, "Let's do this." And I did that. I said to Jimmy, "We're only going to go for Eyes of the Nation." He didn't want to come here. He hated it. From the beginning, he said to me, "You walk past people. You don't want to fly over there." And so we came, and then I did a book called Cartographia -
Jennifer Prokop 56:38 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 56:38 / #
Which took seven years.
Jennifer Prokop 56:41 / #
I have a copy of it. It's beautiful!
Vincent Virga 56:43 / #
Isn't it beautiful?
Jennifer Prokop 56:44 / #
Cartographia is really your book. You are the author of record,
Vincent Virga 56:50 / #
I wrote that book. Meanwhile, remember, I had already done Eyes of the Nation, and I had done all these other books. So everybody knew me, I had full access. And when I would go in, I always had an idea of what I wanted. And I divided the book. This is what we call in the theater "a two o'clock in the morning idea." You're supposed to wake up in the morning and say, "What a stupid idea!" I didn't. I went in, and I said to Ron Grim at the Library of Congress, and he adored me because he was my guy in Eyes of the Nation. And so I said, "I have this idea." And so we began. And since I was going all over the world, the book is about maps as cultural documents. I tell the story, the history of the country, and the civilization through the map. So I say in the very beginning, it took me forever, and I was under contract to Little, Brown, and I went to this big, big event, a publishing event, and Jimmy was hosting a table. And there I was, in my tux, surrounded by all of my friends who were editors-in-chiefs and all these wonderful kids, people who had grown up with me. And the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown came over and said to me, "Vincent! We were talking about you in an editorial board meeting." And I said, "Oh?" And he said, "Yes! If you don't finish this book in six months, we're canceling the book."
Sarah MacLean 58:15 / #
(gasp) Not fun! Not cool at a gala! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 58:20 / #
No, not cool!
Sarah MacLean 58:22 / #
I object!
Vincent Virga 58:25 / #
I had been all over the Library of Congress for six years, and all these people explaining what the map meant. And I then went back to library and I thought, I have six months and I have, I have 1000's of pages. And so I wrote the introduction. What is a map? I wrote the basic introduction. And then as I went through, I thought to myself, you have one day for each map, if you can have one day for each map, will then come to the end of it. And meanwhile, I was surrounded by all these scholars who kept wanting to read my stuff, and they just adored my stuff. And they would say, "Oh, but you have to do this. You have to do that. You have to explain to me why was this huge thing going on in India?" And I would say, "No."
Jennifer Prokop 59:17 / #
(laughter) I've one day.
Vincent Virga 59:19 / #
One day. And so I did it. I did it. And essentially, it's a wonderful book.
Jennifer Prokop 59:26 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 59:26 / #
I think. And also I invented this thing where I said, I create a metaphor. Map as A. Map as B. And when the book came out, now remember, I have no, no, I'm not an academic, and when the book came out, it was accepted because of Ron Grim and but I was the key name on the thing and they behaved abominably. Then it went to be reviewed by THE great journal Imago Mundi, and it was assigned to the head of the maps division in the British Museum.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:02 / #
Oh. No pressure. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:05 / #
He reviewed the book and he begins with, "You know, when I first started reading this book, I thought to myself, "It's very relaxed.""
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
Unlike the British Museum,
Vincent Virga 1:00:16 / #
All of sudden these metaphors begin. "It's beautifully written, but he creates these metaphors for each map. And my first reaction, it's awfully simplistic. And it's awfully American." He writes this.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:31 / #
Terrible scathing review! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:33 / #
Then he turns around and says, "This book is magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. It is a total triumph. It is so inventive, it is so brilliant. And it's magnificent!" Well that, of course, did not help me in the academic world. Imago Mundi, I started reviewing for Imago Mundi and the academics were freaked, because I was going to all these conventions and asking all these questions. And, um, it was a great, great experience. And then it became number one on Amazon and five different -
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:13 / #
Wow.
Vincent Virga 1:01:14 / #
Sections.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:14 / #
Great.
Vincent Virga 1:01:15 / #
So, and then I stayed on, you know, Jimmy said, "Oh, we can go home now." But then the books kept coming, kept coming. So ultimately, I think there are now 29 books from the Library of Congress with my name. And also I did movie calendars, because I had all these friends. And you know, and I would call these people in, the publisher would say to me, "The Library of Congress is 1000 pound gorilla." So I very boldly, you know, I would call people. And I, first of all, I called my pal who was the head of 20th Century Fox legal, and he gave me permission to use the images without pay. But I had to get permission from everyone in the image. That meant I had to -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:59 / #
Wow, that's rough.
Vincent Virga 1:01:59 / #
Had to bring in people. There were all those people. I couldn't do it. I mean, basically, two brilliant brilliant people did that for me. But I had to call the difficult ones. I had to call Lauren Bacall, because her agency screamed at me over the phone. Four letter words. So I called her as the, you know, the 1000 pound gorilla. And I explained that we wanted to do this for Humphrey Bogart, because he wanted to use a picture. It was for Film Preservation Society, which I know she loves. And so she said, "Oh, sure, you can do it." So she called the people back and said, "Yeah, he can have this. He can do this." They call me back and every four letter word, "You know how she treats us? Do you know what she does to us?" And then with Kim Novak, which was the joy of my life, because I worshipped Kim Novak. And basically I put her on the back of Eyes of the Nation. So her people said no. I called Kim Novak. And Faye Dunaway. I called Faye Dunaway. And Jimmy had just reviewed her book in the New York Times which she loved. And I said basically, "When are you going to play a Long Day's Journey into Night?" She said, "Yes." So essentially, that was what I was doing at the Library of Congress.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Amazing.
Vincent Virga 1:02:02 / #
Then comes The Princesse de Cleves and then comes Vadriel Vale. And then I was thinking again, and I was alive again to my book. And I started thinking, what's next? I want the Gaywyck trilogy, so what's next? Next is to take the 19th century melodrama. I've taken the gothic romance. I've taken the psychological drama. Let's do the melodrama. So basically I created Children of Paradise, and I will never forget the moment sitting in the west coast of Ireland, and starting that book, and standing in the front room, with Robbie, in his house in Gramercy Park. And there I was, back with my crowd. And then I took the characters from Morris because at the end of it, Foster says, "They go off into the greensward." And then he says in the final, in his afterward, "They could not have lasted in the greensward." So I bring them, I bring them to Gaywyck. The whole point, when I look back on it, is about queer spaces. Now, when I'm reading all this stuff, and I realize my goal was queer spaces. Gaywyck is in 1900. All those people, he's at the opera, all of these people, Vadriel Vale, queer spaces. And so I go epic in Children of Paradise, queer spaces, and we invent the movies! Robbie becomes a movie director. If I'm going to do it with melodrama, I have to invent the movies! So basically, it cannot be published until, it exists in the Beinecke Library, and it exists in William and Mary, because William and Mary did a celebration of Gaywyck, and I asked them if they wanted the third volume of the trilogy. And basically they said, "Yes!" The reason it can't be published is because it was sent out, and the rejections were basically, "Oh, this book doesn't stand alone, and it's too long ago."
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Vincent!
Vincent Virga 1:02:20 / #
"No one remembers Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 1:05:36 / #
We have to get it published!
Vincent Virga 1:05:38 / #
My goal is to have the trilogy published in uniform volume.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:44 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:05:45 / #
That's my goal. And my other goal is either Netflix or Amazon. I want a, I want a series.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Vincent, we're going to get this done. We're going to get - well, I can't, I mean, I can't get the Netflix deal for you, but we're going to get this publishing done. We can do this! We're going to do this. Fated Mates is going to come together, we're going to work together, we're going to do this. We're going to get this done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:14 / #
I would really love that.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:15 / #
We're going to get it done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:15 / #
It's my dream!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:17 / #
Everyone, listen up! We're getting it done. Stay tuned. So did you even know, it was a romance?
Vincent Virga 1:06:26 / #
I knew it was out there, but I wasn't interested. I mean, it was heterosexual, and I thought to myself, "I don't want to read these." Also, the few I picked up when I was at Avon, I thought, "I prefer The Lord Won't Mind." I'm a snob! I mean, you know, I'm a snob! And also, I long, long for romance novels, and I simply am old, and I can't find the ones that - the genre is problematic for me.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:04 / #
In the years since your books were published, have you heard from other gay romance writers who were inspired by you? Do you feel like you've left a mark in that sense? A trail?
Vincent Virga 1:07:18 / #
That was always very moving, because at one point, there was a book published, a Rainbow novel, won the award, I loved it. And in this sense, my note to this writer, and he, he sent me the most wonderful letters, and I got letters, letters, we get letters. We get stacks and stacks of letters. When the book was published, I was getting letters from Japan. In fact, there was a huge review for the book in Japan, and they sent a film crew over to interview me. Yeah, I got a lot of letters, very moving, very touching letters from people who said it helped them come out. That is who said they hid the book. And they loved the book so much, that they were passing it around. In fact, this week I got a letter from a man who 20 years ago, bought it in a bookstore in Florida. And then he lent it to someone and never got it back. So he wanted it, and he recently tracked it down in the original edition, and he loved it more than ever. And I think last week I got, older men who are moving and downsizing will write me and say their partners died and they're moving, and they're bringing very few books, but they must have mine. They must have mine. So that happens as well. I love this book. And then I just get letters randomly saying, "This is my favorite novel, and I just want you to know that." I have no idea why! I got a letter from a young boy. 24 years old, and he said, "I'm a goth, a gay goth, and I love your books. I'm sure you get letters like this all the time." And I wrote back and I said, "No. I do not get letters from 24-year-old gay goths." I'm always saying to Jimmy, "It's so touching to me." And now to be in that book, you know, The History of the -
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:35 / #
Yes! The Romance History from Rebecca Romney.
Vincent Virga 1:09:35 / #
Oh, my god!
Sarah MacLean 1:09:39 / #
Well, I think the thing about Gaywyck that resonates so much with so many people is that you really did knock down the doors of the Gothic, which is a genre that many of us love so much. Many of us cut our teeth on those early Gothics and you re-wrote the rules of it. I'm sad to hear that you you never had a writer community, but I know for a fact that many writers were inspired by you.
Vincent Virga 1:10:10 / #
Several years ago there was a convention, and there was a panel about the gay books. I wasn't invited, and just assumed, you know, I've never gone after this. I did it, as I've said, and I just sort of cruised along with it amused, and knowing what I did,, but at the same time, I remember a book that came out about gay fiction. And there was a little footnote that said, "Oh, and then there's Gaywyck, which is really a footnote, and it will never be anything but a footnote." That's what this thing said, and I thought to myself, "Okay, so maybe there were others before me." And of course, now I've read - I have a whole library of the gay novels before me.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:52 / #
Well I do think that it's worth saying that you are, as far as any of us can tell, you are the first gay Gothic romance, the first gay, possibly the first gay historical Modern romance with sex in it and everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:07 / #
And a happy ending!
Vincent Virga 1:11:08 / #
The happy ending. That was the thing that I think even shook Gwen a bit. And I had been told, Michael Korda said to me, "I want you to write a book. I want you to write a story based on the best of everything." Because he had published that mega bestseller. He said, "I want you to write a best of everything with/for men. I want the gay men to die." And I said, "No." Now when I look back on it, I thought to myself, "You know, I could have killed him in Vietnam. He could have died as a great American hero." But at that point in my heart, I wanted to write this gay Gothic, and I'd already started it. I'm getting statements from Amazon, that people are buying it again. What, what caused this resurgence?
Sarah MacLean 1:12:05 / #
It's a book that people are aware of now. There are many, many more of us now who believe that those paperbacks from the '70s should not have disappeared. They should have been honored in a way that, you know, in the same way that other books from the '70s remain honored. So people are starting to think about the Modern romance, the happily ever after, with sex on the page, what does it look like? What are the roots of the genre? Who are the people who built the house? And we believe that you are a person who has built the house.
Vincent Virga 1:12:43 / #
And now you know, I've been writing, and I wrote a book called He Cooks, I Clean, which is a joke Jimmy and I had. It's a novel, He Cooks, I Clean. And my novels are now very, very erotic because D.H. Lawrence said, "You can't possibly create a fully rounded character, if you don't have their love life." That was his argument for Lady Chatterley's Lover. And basically, I always agreed. I mean, I pussyfooted through Vadriel and through the other ones. I'm a little, little bolder in Children of Paradise, but it was inappropriate for that period, and for my tone. So it's sort of a hidden, though my mother sniffed it out.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:32 / #
(laughter) Moms will do that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:34 / #
Mothers. They know.
Vincent Virga 1:13:33 / #
Mom. And now of course, in these new novels of mine, they're very, very passionate and graphic. But, you know, I've sent them to editors, and they say, "No, but we're supposed to be, we're supposed to be married now. You know what I mean? It's supposed to be all over, but it's not all over. For me, it will always be the Ramrod shootings on the publication that, I don't know that I can ever move beyond that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:14:10 / #
So that's where I am, and I'm sad. Deeply saddened. I'm waiting to see what's waiting for me, because I'm now reading The Prophets. I've just started it. And I don't know what's going to happen in that, but I think it's going to be very unhappy. But of course, they're slaves and I've already started to cry, like, in the first chapter, by what he describes, but I'm, I'm in this, you know. I'm in this. And I live in hope.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:44 / #
Wow! That was so amazing!
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:53 / #
Sarah, before we talk about our feelings, I want you to tell our listeners about the story of how Vincent came to be on the podcast.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:04 / #
Ohhh.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:05 / #
Because it's a good one. Everybody listen, we had a list, and we didn't hear back. A lot of people we just didn't hear back from.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:13 / #
Yeah! You will hear - we will do this: whenever there is an interesting story related to how we found a person, we will tell the story at the end. Vincent Virga. We discovered him - I think Steve Ammidown rang my bell about him when we were doing the Trailblazer thing for the RITA's in 2019, which keeps coming up because it was a really important piece of my learning about the history of the genre, which I thought I kind of knew, and then suddenly there were all these names that Steve really, Steve helped with that. And he kind of rang my bell about it, and so when we made our list of Trailblazers, he was an obvious choice.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:59 / #
He also, Gaywyck appears in Rebecca Romney's romance catalog.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:05 / #
That happened after we started looking for him. What's interesting about the Rebecca Romney catalog and Fated Mates' Trailblazers episodes is they really have, I think we and Rebecca are often like, "Oh, that's great. That person is on our list. Or our person is on her list." So it's a really cool marriage of the two projects. But I went looking for him, and I found he has a website that hasn't been updated very recently, and I sent him an email that just introduced us, because at this point, you know, I don't expect people know who we are.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:45 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:46 / #
So I introduced us and I sort of said, "Well, I'm in New York, and I think you're in New York, and I'm happy to come. I'm vaccinated." A lot of these emails are very, "If you can't do this, we're happy to come and be with you. We're vaccinated." And my phone rang, and it was a weird number from New York. so I let it go to voicemail, because, obviously, I let it go to voicemail. Who answers the phone?
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:12 / #
Nobody.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:12 / #
And I had a voicemail from him. And I will say this, you guys, I have had a couple of really great voicemails over the course of this project, because what I've discovered is many people who are of a certain age, are very happy to make a telephone call. So Vincent and I chatted a couple of times before we recorded.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:34 / #
The first time Sarah talked to him, she called me. You actually called me, I don't know if it was catching. And you were like, "We're a Vincent Virga stan podcast."
Sarah MacLean 1:17:44 / #
Basically, we're just going to have Vincent Virga on as our third forever. Like, you can just join us all the time. And here's the thing, I had heard some of those stories already, because we've had a couple of really great conversations, but this episode. Jen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:58 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:59 / #
I cried twice!
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:01 / #
So for those of you listening in real time, usually we release on a Wednesday. And here it is, it's an unusual day. We released Beverly Jenkins a couple of days ago, and here we are releasing another Trailblazer. And that's because this date is very special. This is actually the 41st anniversary of the release of Gaywyck. And the reason we know that is because, if we remember, Vincent mentioned that the night of the party, that essentially was celebrating it, there was a massacre at the Ramrod bar, and that happened on Wednesday, November 19, 1980. I will put some of these articles in show notes. This is for many people, maybe little remembered, part of gay history. A former police officer entered a gay bar called the Ramrod and opened fire. And so, you know, this was a point in the interview where all of us, I think, but Vincent especially, got really teary because here it was, this kind of height, of kind of a career and a moment for him, and it was this really brutal reminder of how unaccepting some people would always be of love stories and happily ever afters for gay and lesbian, and at that point, probably those were the only categories of Americans. So that's the reason we really wanted to release today's episode on the anniversary because -
Sarah MacLean 1:19:33 / #
We wanted to say it same. The Trailblazer episodes are about speaking the names of the people who built the house, and in this particular case, it felt important to say the name of the Ramrod massacre and to talk about this today. In shownotes we'll also put the names of the victims -
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:34 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:34 / #
Of the shootings, and you know, we're our thinking Vincent today, but we are so, so happy to have had him on the podcast. I was - what a remarkable life!
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:10 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:11 / #
He is living! I think it's amazing how much he had to say about the work and about writing love stories, for somebody who we have not heard from. As a genre, we don't talk about Vincent as much as I think maybe we should.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:32 / #
Yeah. I think one of the other things that is especially poignant, is how people would whisper to him. This really stuck with me. "I loved your book, but I can't really talk about it publicly." I think Rebecca's catalog has a lot of really interesting information about the evolution of gay romance from Gaywyck. And I'm going to include a thread from a librarian I follow, Angie Manfredi, who talked about how the assault on putting LGBTQ+ literature in libraries is more intense than ever. And how vital it is for kids, for teenagers, I mean for all kinds of people, but kids especially, to be able to see themselves in literature portrayed in a positive way and having the potential for happiness and joy, and all kinds of stories. And she gives in this thread, some really specific things that you can do as a regular person, as simple as calling up your local library and saying, "I hope that you are keeping these materials on the shelves for kids and teenagers in our community." So I just want to say how urgent it is that, you know, we not take this for granted. I was very, it's sometimes really overwhelming to feel like we've made no progress, but the way we make sure we keep the progress we have made is by fighting for it, and not just assuming. Right? Not just assuming that they'll always be gay and trans and lesbian romance, or bisexuals in romance, and that especially if we want those materials to persist and be around for everyone, that we make it clear to our local libraries that, and our school libraries especially, that we support having those materials on the shelves.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:30 / #
And on top of it, purchasing those materials if you are able to, making sure that those materials pass through bookstores. And requesting those materials from your local bookstore, making sure that when you're in Barnes & Noble, you're asking for books that represent all marginalized communities, but especially those in LGBTQIA+ community. This is a second piece of the library struggle, but we all saw what happened on Election Day in Virginia, and we know that the critical race theory piece was a HUGE piece that swung Virginia red, particularly with white women. And I want to just say that there's another great thread that went around last week that basically underscored that libraries are going to be the frontline for so much of this. Anybody who was following that story in Virginia knows that it started with a mom, a white mom, who was horrified that her son was forced to read Beloved in class, and traumatized by the content in Beloved. So when we're talking about books being banned, we're talking about it happening right now, all over. So we'll throw that into show notes too.
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:58 / #
Yes. And that's it. These are, I think it's really also important to say it seems so easy to think it's happening somewhere else. It's happening everywhere.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:09 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:10 / #
It is happening at a school board in your town. Someone is going after books that they think are you know, and I just think as romance readers, if we care about happily everyone after, we have to care about, we have to be literally willing to stand up and say, because they're going to come at, you know, romance will be first, right? But when I think about children, when I think about the kids in my room who need to see books about themselves on the shelves, this, this is urgent work, that we as listeners and we as readers have to be a part of, because it starts with censorship, right? It starts with banning books. It starts with saying, "We shouldn't be teaching these things because they make me uncomfortable."
Sarah MacLean 1:25:08 / #
Yeah. And books are world changing in the sense that when you read a book, when any kid reads these books, it changes the way they look at the world. And that's what we need.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
And that's why they want to get rid of them.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:22 / #
I also just want to say and this is, you know, we're down a little bit of a Fated States rabbit hole now, but I just want to say listen, school boards too, I mean, we saw that on Tuesday, on the Election Day this year. The battle for this country is happening in school board races.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:44 / #
So if you are out there, and you are like, "What could I do? I don't want to, I can't run for Senator. How could I help?" Check out runforsomething.net where you can learn more about running in your town to be on the school board. You know, right now school boards are really front lining this.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:05 / #
Yes. And I would just say, like I said, if you can't do that you can call your principal. I mean that's the thing, there are things, you can call the principal of your school and say, "I support having books that talk about race and racism and have gay and lesbian characters in them. There are lots of things that you can do. And I think it's just really important. We're big believers in, you know, civic action. So it doesn't have to be running for Senate, but it can be calling your kid's principal and saying, "Don't you dare take these books out of these classrooms. I want my kid to be learning the truth about who we are as a country. I want my kid to be reading stories about people that are not like them. I want my kid to see the whole world out there in their classroom."
Sarah MacLean 1:26:55 / #
In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed our interview with Vincent. We hope you head out and pick up Gaywyck on what you can get in print or in ebook, and we hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. We thought, I mean, I don't know if I've said this on the recordings yet, but it really does feel like every single conversation is so different from all the others.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:17 / #
Oh, absolutely!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:18 / #
And this was really a delight! And I told Eric when we finished, I was like, "We have to have him for dinner because he's amazing!" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:28 / #
Honestly, I mean and that's the thing, let alone from Gaywyck, the story of his life doing images and the other work that he did, this is someone who had a long and distinguished career in publishing.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:40 / #
Yeah, and I want to hear all about Watergate! (laughter) Tell me everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:44 / #
I want to hear about Bill and Hillary. Everything!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:47 / #
Going through pictures that were like under the bed in Hillary Clinton's house.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:51 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:51 / #
Sounds like, first of all, if I had known that job existed, I would not be sitting here with you, dummy. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:58 / #
Fine. My goodness.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:59 / #
Anyway, that was remarkable! I'm so glad that we did that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:04 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:05 / #
And I hope you all loved it. Tell us how you felt about it on Twitter @FatedMates or on Instagram @FatedMatespod. You can also send Vincent an email the same way we did at his website vincentvirga.com. I think Vincent would probably be really thrilled to hear from all of you, if you felt moved by his stories. And otherwise you can find us at fatedmates.net. We will be back on Wednesday on proper schedule, but today we hope you're being kind to yourself and others.
S04.05: Radclyffe: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Radclyffe—author of lesbian romances and founder of the LGBTQIA+ publisher, Bold Strokes Books. We talk about her path to romance as a reader and an author, and a publisher, about the early days of queer romance, about the importance of independent booksellers to the queer community, and about how readers find themselves in books.
Thank you to Radclyffe for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.
Our next read along is Uzma Jalaluddin’s Hana Kahn Carries On. Find it at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Welcome Radclyffe, romance author and founder of Bold Strokes Books. The internet archive has preserved her fanfiction site.
Bookstores mentioned: Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, Womancrafts in Provincetown, and an article about the current state of Queer bookstores in America.
Publishing and Distributors Radclyffe mentioned: Naiad Press, founded by Barbara Greer, Sarah Aldridge, and Muriel Crawford; Regal Crest Enterprises is now Flashpoint Publications; Fawcett; Bella Booksfounded by Linda Hill; and Alyson Books.
Awards mentioned: Lambda Literary Awards, and the RWA Prism award
Further Reading: Creating a Literary Culture: A Short, Selective, and Incomplete History of LGBT Publishing, Part I, Part 2, and Part 3 by Michael Neva in the LARB,
TRANSCRIPT
Radclyffe 00:00:00 / #: What we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with, the power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:38 / #: That was Radclyffe the next in our Trailblazers series. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:00:49 / #: And I'm Jennifer Prokop. I am a romance reader and critic.
Sarah MacLean 00:00:54 / #: And Radclyffe is the founder of Bold Strokes Books, which is an important LGBTQ publisher. She is a writer and one of the important and long-time voices for lesbian and queer romance.
Jennifer Prokop 00:01:12 / #: Today we'll be talking about her journey to romance, the founding of Bold Strokes Books, why it is important for LGBTQ publishers to exist, and how the romance landscape for queer literature, queer bookstores and queer romance has changed in the many years that she has been reading, writing, and publishing.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:33 / #: Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Radclyffe. We're thrilled to have you.
Radclyffe 00:01:41 / #: Well, thank you for asking me. I'm really glad to be here.
Sarah MacLean 00:01:44 / #: So we're really interested in journeys and we've talked so much over the years about our journeys as romance readers and writers. So could we start there? Let's start with how you came to write and write romance.
Radclyffe 00:02:01 / #: I think that part of my story, I'm sure you've heard many times before, which is almost and probably experienced yourself, which is anyone who writes has always written things. For me as a small girl growing up, I will say this, in the '50s, there were very few things that I saw in the world around me that reflected what I wished I could do on television or the books that I read, the games that people played. Although I was fortunate to have an older brother, so I learned to play a lot of sports.
00:02:39 / #: So I started writing things when I was really young, putting girls and then women in the scenarios that I didn't get to see anywhere, including in the books that I read. But I didn't really think about writing anything, "Big," quote, unquote, until I was actually a surgery resident, and I was really, really busy and pressured. And it was a world where I also felt like a little bit of an outsider because I was a woman in surgery when there weren't a lot of women in surgery either. So I started writing just to kind of express the parts of myself that weren't being expressed.
00:03:19 / #: So I wrote my first full-length, what I would now call my first lesbian novel in 1980, with absolutely no anticipation that it would ever become anything except this thing that I had written that pleased me. No one ever read it, no one ever saw it. And I just put it in a drawer. And as the years went by, I did that again and again when I had free time, often on my vacations, I would write another one of those until I had eight of them in my drawer. Maybe my girlfriends of the time would read them or one of my best friends, but no one else ever read them and I never anticipated that I would be a, quote, unquote, "Author."
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:00 / #: The difference between growing up in the '50s and the '80s, did you still feel that there was this dearth of stories that you wanted to read? Even then, there was no little change between growing up and then being a doctor?
Radclyffe 00:04:14 / #: That's a great question. And the answer is there was a change, but it wasn't enough of a change or a big enough of a change. And that's another part of my story, a cool part of my story, actually, when I was 12, I used to read everything I could find. And mostly they were paperbacks that came out of the drug stores and supermarkets and whatever my mom was reading.
Sarah MacLean 00:04:34 / #: Same.
Radclyffe 00:04:34 / #: And I somehow-
Jennifer Prokop 00:04:37 / #: One of us.
Radclyffe 00:04:37 / #: Yeah, I somehow, I don't know how, found this book written by Ann Bannon called Beebo Brinker, and I was 12, and it's the first time I ever read anything that had two women involved in it. And I was 12, and I was starting to realize that I wasn't like everyone else. And this book really made a huge impression on me, but I also knew it was probably something that I wasn't supposed to show anybody else. And I kept it behind the other books in my bookcase.
00:05:10 / #: And I didn't hear the word lesbian until I was 18 years old. So it wasn't that, it was a sense in the world around me that what I was feeling was probably not what I ought to be feeling. But that book made a huge impression on me. And I went to school in Philadelphia where one of the country's oldest gay and lesbian bookstores was established, Giovanni's Room.
00:05:35 / #: And in 1973, I discovered in this bookstore that had two shelves and about 10 books, the first lesbian romance that Naiad Press ever published called The Latecomer by Sarah Aldridge. And it was the first lesbian romance I had ever read, although interestingly from a historical point of view, they did not call them romances. They called them lesbian novels at the time for about another eight years. And I read that book like a million times.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:08 / #: Can you ground us with a date for this?
Jennifer Prokop 00:06:12 / #: Now that's when you found it. Was that also when it was published?
Radclyffe 00:06:15 / #: That's when it was published, 1973. Naiad Press was established in 1972 by Barbara Grier and two other women.
Sarah MacLean 00:06:24 / #: Was Naiad exclusively publishing lesbian novels?
Radclyffe 00:06:27 / #: Yes, Barbara Grier and Sarah Aldridge and Muriel Crawford were the three women who established it. And that went on to be the premier lesbian press until the late '90s when Barbara sold it and it changed names. So I would go there every week looking for another book, and there was never another book. They published one nine months later, and then maybe another nine months, and then eventually they would do three or four a year and then two a month, which was like, but that took years to get there. So I started writing my own and I didn't really think about publishing them.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:05 / #: Can you tell us what kind of stories were these?
Radclyffe 00:07:08 / #: My very first one was a western, of course, because when I grew up, I wanted to be a cowboy. I had a little star and I had six shooters, and I played soldiers a lot too, which actually when I tell you about what I write, you'll probably understand exactly why I write what I write. But I was the girl on the block with all boys, and I had an older brother, so I had six shooters and rifles and badges, and I wanted to be a cowboy. So I wrote a western, and it's called Innocent Hearts. And it's the first one I wrote, it's not the first one that was published. I think it was published probably fourth, and it took place in the west around the 1860s or so.
Sarah MacLean 00:07:57 / #: So like historical western?
Jennifer Prokop 00:07:58 / #: Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:07:59 / #: Yeah. It features an 18-year-old rancher. No, she's about 20. And the young woman she gets involved with came from Boston with her family, and her father was going to start a newspaper there. They're both very innocent. When you write in that era with two young women in particular, you really can't use the language we use today. So anyways, that's the first one I wrote because I wanted to be the one with the horse, the guns and the girl.
Sarah MacLean 00:08:30 / #: Nice.
Jennifer Prokop 00:08:33 / #: And so at the time, you said you started with Ann Bannon, and was there a sense of romance as a genre? Did you know you were writing something called a romance?
Radclyffe 00:08:45 / #: I knew I was writing a love story. I didn't really think of it as a genre because I wasn't really thinking about writing and publishing at all. I was just thinking about writing the stories that really moved me and with the kind of characters and the kind of situations that really touched me and I was writing the characters that I wanted to be. One of the next book I wrote was a police officer, which is Safe Harbor, which was the first book that was published. And so that's the next one I wrote. Then I did a police procedural stories, the Justice series with cops.
00:09:28 / #: So throughout the '80s I was writing these books. And I'll tell you a story, which I have told a couple times. In 1988, I decided I would try publishing one of them. So I sent it to Naiad Press, and the submission procedures was a lot different then. You had to send them a little query and tell them about your book and your writing experience and all that sort of thing. And my only writing experience was medical papers. But the publisher at the time would then call you and say, "I would like to read your manuscript." So she called me on a Sunday morning at 7:30 in the morning.
00:10:03 / #: And I should preface the story by saying that I have a tremendous amount of respect for this person. And without her, many of us would not be here. So she called me 7:30, and I told her I had read every book that they'd ever published. And she said, "Well, send your manuscript and let's see if you've been washed in the blood of Naiad." So, "Okay." And I sent it, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:10:30 / #: Wow. I'm going to start using that phrase with people, "Have you been washed in the blood of Fated Mates?" "Fine."
Radclyffe 00:10:36 / #: Yeah. So I waited and waited and waited, and I'm doing my office hours one afternoon at the hospital, and my secretary gives me this message and it says, "Barbara Grier called." And I'm like, "Oh." So I run to my office and I call her back and she says, "Well, we're interested in publishing this book." She said, "But it's really not very good." And she said, "You're kind of a mediocre author and you'll probably never be anything more than a mediocre author." And I thought-
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:07 / #: My face right now. I know. I'm like, "Ah."
Radclyffe 00:11:11 / #: Please remember what I said about Barbara Grier.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: No.
Sarah MacLean 00:11:13 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:13 / #: Sure, of course, of course.
Radclyffe 00:11:13 / #: She's one of my heroes, okay? And they didn't like the fact that I opened the book with a scene where the major character is at a party and she is drinking a little too much and has a history of using drugs. Now, this was 1980, right?
Jennifer Prokop 00:11:31 / #: Right.
Radclyffe 00:11:32 / #: Because me, I write dark heroes who are wounded and because eventually the process of falling in love allows them to heal those wounds, they have to start there. She wanted me to change that. And I thought about it, and I didn't want to do that. And I said, "I am really honored that you called me, but I don't think I want to do this." And there was complete and total silence on the line for like 30 seconds. I don't think anybody had ever said, "No."
Sarah MacLean 00:12:06 / #: "Barbara, hello?"
Radclyffe 00:12:07 / #: And so that was that. And I was so mad.
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:08 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:08 / #: Of course you were.
Radclyffe 00:12:10 / #: I was so mad that I went home and I wrote another book, so that was really inspiring.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:19 / #: Yeah. Well, but I think this is really interesting. I think for a lot of romance writers, often this story is told, this kind of, "I gave it to a gatekeeper, and the gatekeeper said, 'No, no, you can't come in here with this.'" And I mean, it happens with, "You can't have a character who has a history with drugs." It happens with, "You can't have characters who look, love, et cetera, the way that these characters do." And these gatekeepers often say, "Well that, it just doesn't sell or that's just not what romance is."
Jennifer Prokop 00:12:55 / #: There's no market for it.
Sarah MacLean 00:12:56 / #: It doesn't follow the rules. And those of us who have succeeded, many of us have succeeded because we've said, "No, that's not a good rule. I don't want to be gate kept in that way."
Radclyffe 00:13:08 / #: I think the other thing is if you really believe in what you've written and you've written it because you have something to say in a particular way, then that's not the right place for your book. I think in 1988, maybe it wouldn't have sold. Maybe it wouldn't have appealed. She certainly felt that way, and Barbara was very successful. And in later years we were good friends and she was kind enough to tell me once that I was a mistake on her part. So that was really nice of her.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:39 / #: That's nice.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:40 / #: Yeah, that is nice. You're the one that got away.
Sarah MacLean 00:13:43 / #: Vindication.
Jennifer Prokop 00:13:44 / #: Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:13:47 / #: So I began sharing the things that I had written through fan fiction which is a roundabout way to answer your question. And that was the first time I had really started sharing the things that I had written with people I didn't know with people that I had no idea how they were going to respond to the things that I wrote. But it was a really energizing kind of exhilarating experience to put the things I had written out there and have people comment on them and like them and I became enthusiastic and developed a big fan fiction following. I was writing X-Files fan fiction.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:23 / #: Oh, right on. Yeah, sure.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:25 / #: Perfect. A good fandom too to be a part of.
Jennifer Prokop 00:14:30 / #: Sure, right.
Radclyffe 00:14:30 / #: Yeah, it was great. It suited me really well. And I had created fan fiction with an original character called Marshall Black who became Scully's lover. And people afterwards have said, "I started reading watching the X-Files, but I couldn't find Marsh in the stories," because they were looking for her. So I started a website and I put the original fiction that I had written all those years ago on my website.
Sarah MacLean 00:14:56 / #: Does this still exist?
Radclyffe 00:14:58 / #: Yes, it does, on my RedFic.com website. It's still there. Three publishers contacted me and wanted to publish my original fiction just out of the blue. And I really, well, naively number one, I said yes to everybody, which was a bad mistake. And number two, I had to think really hard about whether I wanted to do that. Whether I wanted to hand it over. Whether I wanted to sort of give away ownership of this work because I understood that being published, that's what happens and that is what happens.
00:15:32 / #: And I think that as authors, we have to understand that, that we enter into a partnership that isn't always a partnership because we have similar goals, but not always the same goals. But I said yes, and I loved the process. As soon as I started publishing, I wanted to understand everything about it, and that's what led to me eventually starting my own company.
Sarah MacLean 00:15:55 / #: Yeah. So talk a little bit about Bold Strokes Books and how that came to be?
Radclyffe 00:16:02 / #: It pretty much grew out of my experience with publishing with these small publishers. And I call them small publishers, mostly because of the model, and it's not in a negative way at all, but they were POD publishers, relatively small.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:16 / #: So that, everybody, means print-on-demand.
Radclyffe 00:16:18 / #: Which is not what it is today. Today print-on-demand pretty much rolls right over into all of the pretty much normal distribution, but at that time it didn't.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:27 / #: What year do you think this was?
Radclyffe 00:16:31 / #: About 2000. Yeah, and Safe Harbor was published in 2001.
Sarah MacLean 00:16:34 / #: Do the publishers still exist?
Radclyffe 00:16:36 / #: One of them does. That was Regal Crest Enterprises, and it's just this past year changed hands and I believe changed names, but some of the same authors. But the other two, one went out of business very quickly and the other one went out of business after she failed to pay anyone royalties.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:54 / #: Well, some things-
Radclyffe 00:16:56 / #: That happens.
Jennifer Prokop 00:16:56 / #: That will happen [inaudible 00:16:57 / #], yeah.
Radclyffe 00:16:58 / #: That does happen. So I very quickly realized that the model wasn't going to work because it limited distribution and it limited exposure of the titles. And I learned that from going to some bookstores, particularly in Provincetown. And one of my first books was set in Provincetown, it's Safe Harbors, the first in the Provincetown Tales, and they wouldn't order it or couldn't order it because of the way it was being produced. And I thought, this is not right.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:27 / #: And it's worth saying Provincetown is like a premier vacation destination in the summer for many gay and lesbian Americans.
Radclyffe 00:17:37 / #: That is true.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:37 / #: This is like my brother and his partner were there this summer. It's ground zero.
Radclyffe 00:17:41 / #: So was I, everybody went back as soon as we could get out.
Jennifer Prokop 00:17:44 / #: And that's it. So what I'm saying, this is what I want people to understand, if Provincetown couldn't get their hands on this book. So I just think it's really important to place that in-
Radclyffe 00:17:53 / #: Yeah, the context. And that said to me that this model is not going to work. And it wasn't just about my books, it was about all of our books because if queer authors didn't have access to the same kind of distribution and exposure and marketing that everyone else got, we would not reach our readership. And that to me has always been critical.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:17 / #: To that end, can we talk about what we would call traditional publishing today? The kind of big five, at the time there were many more than five, but the big houses.
Radclyffe 00:18:27 / #: Now there's like four and a half or something.
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:27 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:30 / #: Right, it's just the numbers are dwindling. What did romance look like there?
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:36 / #: Or queer fiction even?
Sarah MacLean 00:18:37 / #: Or, yeah-
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: I mean maybe-
Sarah MacLean 00:18:38 / #: ... I mean-
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:38 / #: ... queer romances and even-
Radclyffe 00:18:40 / #: In the mainstream?
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:40 / #: Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 00:18:41 / #: Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 00:18:41 / #: Or did it exist at all?
Radclyffe 00:18:43 / #: Not much. I mean, if I think back to that time, I will say this, in the late '60s and early '70s, mainstream publishers were publishing mostly in paperback. And there were a lot of works featuring both lesbians and gay men for a brief period of time. Fawcett and the paperbacks, that's where Anne Bannon's books were published. One of the very first lesbian romances, a Place of our Own was actually published, and I don't remember which mainstream publishers, but then it disappeared and I'm not sure why.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:22 / #: When was Sarah Waters writing? When was Tipping the Velvet?
Radclyffe 00:19:26 / #: I would say in the '90s. Remember, it's also British and-
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:31 / #: Not short.
Radclyffe 00:19:32 / #: ... not traditionally romance. Her books are historical works, and that's how they were marketed well.
Jennifer Prokop 00:19:38 / #: That's how they kind of... okay.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:38 / #: And then Anne Allen Shockley was writing for Avon before Avon was HarperCollins, but when Avon was a pulp fiction house?
Radclyffe 00:19:47 / #: Yes. And that was 1971, I think.
Sarah MacLean 00:19:51 / #: The early '70s. Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:19:52 / #: Right, so it was a very small window. And I don't know what actually happened culturally, socially, at around that time to basically say to publishers, "We're not going to sell enough of them." Maybe they just didn't sell enough of those books. I do know that over the years when there were several very, very, very popular lesbian authors, for example, particularly writing mysteries, and they got picked up by mainstream publishers, they didn't make it. They didn't sell enough to continue to publish with them. And I think part of it is audience size, and I just think it's a smaller audience.
Sarah MacLean 00:20:35 / #: Okay. So we have these small publishers in the early thousands, early 2000s that are trying to make a go of it, but they can't get the print on demand books into stores. And then you think to yourself, what?
Radclyffe 00:20:50 / #: I think we need the same model that everybody else has. So I very naively, since I don't know anything about publishing except what I've been doing, decide I'm going to start a publishing company, but the very first thing I did was figure out how to get distribution. And I was very fortunate that at just about the same time, another lesbian publisher of size had decided that she wanted to start a distribution company. So she said-
Sarah MacLean 00:21:17 / #: And who is that?
Radclyffe 00:21:18 / #: Bella Books, Linda Hill. And I'm just a small fry. So Linda said, "If you're interested, I'm going to start this distribution company and we can, essentially, umbrella your books into our distribution system." And I said, "Yes," which from the get-go gave me mainstream distribution.
00:21:37 / #: So all of our print books have always been distributed like everybody else's. And then the challenge became getting the people at the other end to actually buy them. That's a different story.
00:21:50 / #: So we've had mainstream distribution from the beginning and that gave the authors that I signed I think, the best chance for international exposure and to get into bookstores and libraries and places that they couldn't at the time.
Sarah MacLean 00:22:04 / #: So how were you finding authors at this point? Because obviously there's no shortage of authors to find, but what's the vision at this point for you?
Radclyffe 00:22:14 / #: I'll tell you the mission statement. There were two things that I wanted to do. I wanted to publish quality queer fiction, and I did not want to only publish lesbian fiction. So my goal was always to publish queer fiction. That was good stuff, and I wanted to create a platform to support authors and help them with their careers. So those were my two goals, and that's what we've worked on since the company has started.
00:22:47 / #: Early on, most of the authors that I signed were people that I had met at conventions and FanFic places, so a lot of them came out of fan fiction that first year. I think every single one of the authors I signed had been writing fan fiction.
00:23:03 / #: And then as we began to create a profile and our books were out there and we were going to events and people were getting to know us, we began to expand. And it's been years since and some of the authors still write fan fiction, because they really like it, but they're not coming out of the fan fiction community anymore. Not in any large numbers at all for at least a decade, probably more.
Jennifer Prokop 00:23:27 / #: I think one of the things that's really changed is if you had asked me in 2000 if a lesbian romance was for me, I probably would've said like, "No." But now I do feel like that romance readers who love romance read all kinds of romance as those times have changed. Or maybe you feel like they haven't. Do you still think there's the perception that the queer fiction and romances that you are publishing are only for queer readers? Do you see that that's changed on your end or is that just me being like pie in the sky?
Radclyffe 00:24:00 / #: It's hard because as you know, from a demographic point of view, you can't pinpoint who is buying a book. But I think overall, there's not very much crossover. I know that there is some, there's certainly, when I was writing fan fiction, I know that there were people who would write and say, "I'm straight," so that I would know that and say, "But I love it."
00:24:21 / #: People tell me that they give their books, my authors tell me they give their books to people in the office, and some of them really like it. But I don't know that those are people who are seeking out these works. But it's very much like if you look at how do people find books, it's very often word of mouth or personal recommendation. And I think that you're probably far more aware of what's out there. I think the average reader would still think, "This is not for me. I won't to understand it, or I won't relate to it, or it's not my life."
Jennifer Prokop 00:24:56 / #: And I just want to say, I don't want to suggest that you should be writing for the straight gaze, but I just was curious if in the 20 years you have seen a difference. So I just wanted to not sound like a [inaudible 00:25:09 / #].
Radclyffe 00:25:09 / #: I mean, I can tell from our reading community because we have a really vibrant web store and we sell a lot online, and we've really pushed for direct to customer sales, that it's mostly still queer. But again, I don't know, but I think it's probably a tiny percentage. I would love it if it wasn't, I mean, people have often said, "Oh, well, probably it's men buying your books." Hallelujah. I would love for men to buy my books. Please buy my books. But it isn't, it's lesbians and other queers.
Sarah MacLean 00:25:44 / #: We're sponsored this week by Radish, Romance that Feels You. Radish is a comprehensive romance fiction library penned by talented, popular writers, bottomless content, one cute app. So what I think is interesting about Radish is that aside from being a kind of huge catalog based on many, many, many tropes, it's really, really well-structured.
Jennifer Prokop 00:26:06 / #: Oh, it is a romance reader's dream. I mean, honestly, if you haven't played around with it, it has everything so clearly organized and really easy to understand. And I feel like at Radish, they really have the finger on the pulse of what a romance reader wants to read and the most popular tropes.
Sarah MacLean 00:26:27 / #: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of conversation right now in romance, in the romance ether about tropes and why we love them so much and why we're also compulsively brought to them. And I think Radish gets that, but also I think it's a pretty cool system. So the way that Radish works is you pay per episode, which is a little bit like a chapter, but you don't actually pay for the whole book. You just pay for usually about the first 10 or 15 chapters or 10 or 15 episodes are free. And then there are coins to pay for the rest of the book if you want them to go quickly or you can just wait.
Jennifer Prokop 00:27:06 / #: Right, or you can just wait because the new episode will release every hour. And that's really great. I think I found that I really love Radish when I'm running errands, I'm waiting for the car wash, things where I can just, I only have a minute or two to read something and I can get to the end of the chapter. But oh, then I'm home and the next chapter is available for me.
Sarah MacLean 00:27:26 / #: Yeah, and if you are a chaotic reader like me and you read lots of books at the same time, this is actually pretty great because Radish will remind you when a new chapter is available of any of the 25 stories that you're reading. So anyway, if you're a romance reader and we know you all are and you've never tried Radish or you've been thinking about Radish, give it a try.
00:27:49 / #: Our friends there are offering 24 free coins when you sign up through the special link radish.social/fatedmates, you can use those coins to read a book that we've recommended here on another episode, or you can try one of their exclusive episodic series that just go on and on like soap operas. Either way, we think it's something any enthusiastic romance fan will want to check out.
Jennifer Prokop 00:28:15 / #: Thanks again to Radish for sponsoring our show.
Sarah MacLean 00:28:21 / #: At this point, you're really starting to leave a mark, right? I mean, this is your one of Bold Strokes becomes a premier queer publisher, one of the ones that people in the industry have heard of and know and trust. And so I'm curious at this point, who's your community here? Who are the authors who you are feeling are your family here? Who are the other people in publishing who are supporting you?
Radclyffe 00:28:53 / #: There are. When I started, there was a lot of support. I think there was when I started Bold Strokes Books, it was 2004. So queer publishing was still very fragmented and small. There was one big gay male publisher, Alyson, and then there was Naiad out here, and then Bella was Naiad's. Naiad became Bella when Linda bought it, and little here and little there.
00:29:18 / #: So everybody kind of felt like more of a community than we do today in a different way. It was fragmented then because we were geographically separated and probably financially separated, and we didn't have the avenues of marketing that we have today. So there was a fair amount of support from other publishers. Most of the authors came out of the reading community, they were reading these books, they wanted to write these books, and that's where they came from.
00:29:47 / #: Now they're coming, I think, primarily, again, they're all readers, but they're coming internationally, not people that I have individually met early on. Many of the authors I met at events and conferences and could talk to them and they would pitch to me. So there was a much more one-on-one very early. But now we're bigger and we get lots more submissions. So I don't personally know everyone. Our authors are super tight.
00:30:14 / #: When we have a newbie, all of our authors contact them, we put them in contact right away. It's really important, as I'm sure you know, when you write, it's a very solitary experience and we really try to create a community. I want them to know that this is a real company. It doesn't exist out there in the ether somewhere. This is a real entity. There are people behind it that work to help them publish their works, help them better their craft. We introduce them to everyone.
00:30:48 / #: For me personally, my wife, who basically when I said, "Well, I think I'm going to retire from medicine and start this company, and I have no idea if it's going to do anything." And she was just finishing her postdoc. And so we had to move. So we sold our car and we sold our house, and I didn't make any money from the company for almost three years. Just put money in because you got to put money in to publish those books and nobody pays you for a long time.
00:31:18 / #: And I was really fortunate, the people that are with me now have been with me from the beginning. Many of them, my editors, my graphic artists, the authors, we have a very low attrition rate. People do not leave. Thank you. I mean, people stop writing, their life moves on, or they find that maybe the model doesn't suit them, but not many. I mean, I looked at our attrition rate and it's really low.
Jennifer Prokop 00:31:46 / #: So you've talked about the authors, but what do Bold Strokes' readers tell you about what it feels like to have this space for them?
Radclyffe 00:31:55 / #: I know that they're very devoted. All of the authors and myself have really active social media platforms, so we hear from them all the time. But more importantly, we try to do as many in-person events as we can so that we can meet the readers. And it's really important to do that. And for example, every Women's Week, which is a week in Provincetown, starting with Columbus Day, we do a book event for five days.
00:32:23 / #: And we have many readers who come back year after year after year. It's all free. We do readings, we do panels, we do signings, we do chats, whatever we can do that they enjoy, it's for them. So we get a lot of positive feedback. And for me personally as an author, I've received countless emails from people of all ages who've said how important it is for them to see in fiction the life they wish they had or the life they do have that others don't know about.
00:33:03 / #: It's tremendously important for marginalized communities to be able to see themselves in a positive way. Probably one of the earliest and neatest experiences I ever had was I was in Saints and Sinners, which is an event in New Orleans, and it was one of the first erotica readings I did in public, and it was okay. It was a mixed group too. So, "Okay, I'm reading to the guys and I'm reading to women."
00:33:25 / #: And afterwards this young woman who was probably 15, came up to me with her mother to tell me how much she loved my books. And she said, "Oh, Above All, Honor, is one of my favorites." And I'm thinking, "Oh man, it starts with this graphic sex scene in chapter one." And it was awesome. I mean, it was so incredibly gratifying to know that this young person was there with her mom and had found this book and it meant something to her. And all of us, all the authors that I publish have experiences like that.
Sarah MacLean 00:34:03 / #: So let's talk about challenges though. So it's not easy to start a business. It's not easy to start a publishing business, that is for sure. And then you have on top of it, starting a romance business in a romance world that can be very gatekeep-y and conservative, I think we would say, in a lot of ways. So can you talk a little bit about how it is to be Radclyffe in the world of romance?
Radclyffe 00:34:34 / #: Well, first of all, I was nobody to start. I think that almost everyone has to adjust their expectations. And I didn't have any. I didn't set out to be a bestselling author. What I wanted to be was a good author. I wanted to get the books to people who wanted to read them. That was my goal. My goal was not to sell 50,000 books or 500,000 books or to make a lot of money, because I honestly did not think that I would.
00:35:05 / #: So I didn't have the expectations that I think sometimes other authors do, particularly today. I think that a lot of authors think they're going to sell a whole lot of books and make a whole lot of money, and generally that doesn't happen. I wanted my company and my authors, and I'm being a little possessive here, to have everything that everybody else had. So I thought, well, I should be part of the RWA. So that's one of the first things that I did.
00:35:33 / #: One of the very first things that I did to get exposure was join the RWA and go to the RWA, which was terrifying because I didn't know anybody. I didn't look like everybody else for the most part. I didn't write what everybody else was writing. Nobody was talking about what I was writing. And this was just another one of those experiences where you don't fit.
00:35:58 / #: But it was also exhilarating because I went to the classes and the seminars and this is the stuff that I needed to know. So it was amazing. And so then I went through all the hoops so that the RWA would recognize Bold Strokes as a legitimate publisher because we ticked all their boxes. And I made sure that we ticked all their boxes so that we could begin to build a profile as a legitimate, significant publisher of queer fiction.
00:36:31 / #: And every chance I got, every venue that I could go to, I fronted the company. I went there and I said, "This is who we are. This is what we do. We're really good at it." And I think that's my job. My job is to create a profile for this company so that the authors who sign here will have that benefit.
Jennifer Prokop 00:36:54 / #: So looking forward then, do you feel like we're on the precipice of anything? What are your hopes for what romance will look like in five or 10 years? I mean, have you seen positive change that you think will continue?
Radclyffe 00:37:09 / #: Oh, I think romance has changed tremendously. I mean, and as historians, if we're looking at the history of romance fiction, we can go back to Jane Austen, but really it's very compressed in terms of what we as contemporary readers are looking at 50 years maybe. I mean certainly for queer romances, we're looking at 50 years. That's just a little tiny piece of time. And yet so much has been crammed in there.
00:37:36 / #: And for us, for queer romance writers and queer authors in particular, our entire industry really parallels social change. I mean, the more visibility, the more exposure, the more authors, the more work, the more things we're writing about that are relevant to the community. So I think that what we're seeing in romance fiction has changed unbelievably from 50 years ago in terms of sexual content, gender diversity, the issues that are dealt with.
00:38:08 / #: The power of romance that most people do not appreciate is that you can write about anything. You can write about all the challenges of human life in a way that readers will find approachable, that they will relate to, they will think about, there's nothing else that does that. I'm a little prejudiced, but still it's an incredibly powerful genre.
00:38:35 / #: And that's been very true in terms of queer romances where initially we were dealing with the challenges of coming out. What it meant professionally for someone to be queer, to have a queer relationship that wasn't hidden. How do you deal with families? How do you deal with religious prejudices? And then that began to change, and you don't see as many coming out stories. We still do. We still write them because people are still coming out and people are still coming out in places where it's not safe.
00:39:07 / #: But romance has expanded and now we deal with gender diversity and challenges for YA, queer youth. And I think that's only going to continue. I mean, nothing is ever going to stop the romance genre because it deals with human relationships. It deals with what's most critical in our experience are the relationships in our lives. So it's never going to stop, but I think it will continue to transform as the issues that we face as a community, as a civilization change too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:39:44 / #: We say all the time, that romance really iterates on the time that it's in. When it was the AIDS crisis, was queer romance responsive to... I mean, again, did queer romance even exist in the same way? Especially as a doctor, did you see the way that there was fear about HIV? Did that play out in queer romance?
Radclyffe 00:40:12 / #: It played out in queer fiction, but I think that if you look at queer romance, it's just like romance in the mainstream. It's predominantly female oriented. Predominantly written by women with the expectation that the readers will be women. So that the men were writing about it, but that you were seeing it more in the context of the mysteries that they were writing or the general fiction that they were writing.
00:40:38 / #: And I'm not going to say that I didn't see a lot of it in lesbian fiction. Certainly I think in the non-fiction, in the essays and the other works. But in the fiction per se, I would say, it was secondary. And there is that divide, but there's that divide always in romance, what women are writing about and what men are writing about or what women are writing for men to read.
Sarah MacLean 00:41:05 / #: So you said earlier that, "I didn't have expectations," but I'm curious because at some point you did become a name that people know in the world of romance. And I wonder if there's a moment or at what point did you realize like, "Oh, I'm Radclyffe, I'm doing a thing and people know who I am?" And I asked this, and I've asked this of several of the people who we're interviewing for this series, when did you know you were amazing? Because we are, right? You are.
Radclyffe 00:41:42 / #: Okay. I don't know that I'm amazing. People tell me that I am one of the most determined and self-directed people that they know. And I think that that is true. I also have a sense of my own worth, which I think is probably why I said no to Barbara Grier back in the 1980s. But I didn't know what I would become as an author or a publisher. I only knew that I would do my best to do it right and that if anyone could do it, then I could do it.
00:42:14 / #: I mean, that's like we have a saying in surgery, "There's always room at the top," and I believe that. It's hard for someone who didn't train to be a writer, who doesn't either have no background in writing or literature or any of those things to believe. You kind of have that imposter syndrome a little bit at the beginning because I came out of a totally different world. So external recognition of my work for me personally was important and it bothered me. Now, do you know what the Lammy's are?
Sarah MacLean 00:42:55 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards?
Radclyffe 00:42:58 / #: The Lambda Literary Awards are like The RITAs. And it really bothered me the first few years that I was publishing that I didn't get nominated, really bothered me.
Sarah MacLean 00:43:06 / #: So can you explain how does the Lambda work? Because we of course in romance know how The RITA works and it has a lot of problems along the way. But how do you get nominated?
Radclyffe 00:43:18 / #: Well, you can submit your book just like you do to The RITAs, which are now the Vivians. And then basically, if you nominate it, they'll review it pretty much the same way.
Jennifer Prokop 00:43:31 / #: Was there always a romance category? Because that was my question, if this is a category they had to add?
Radclyffe 00:43:37 / #: There wasn't at the very beginning, there were only a few categories, but there has been for many years. And there's always been a little bit more of a literary event, a literary bent as opposed to genre fiction bent in those awards. But they do have genre categories. So if you send your books in, they will review it and then you become a finalist and then you win.
00:44:06 / #: And so I never got to be a finalist, and I couldn't figure out why that was. And it wasn't until really the company got bigger and the company had some recognition and more of my titles were out there and they knew who we were that I won a Lammy. I can't remember the first year, 2005, 2006. That meant a lot to me. Now, some people say those things, you know what they say about awards.
Jennifer Prokop 00:44:36 / #: They are great. That's what they say about them.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:38 / #: It's fun to put them on your shelf.
Radclyffe 00:44:40 / #: It meant something to me because it said to me, at least the people who are looking at similar works see this, they see me. I became visible. So that was important.
Sarah MacLean 00:44:51 / #: And I also have to say that I think that there is a massive difference between the Lambda Literary Award and The RITA or the Vivian in that the discoverability of queer, if I'm looking for great queer romance, I'm going to go to the Lambda Award and look at the winners there. I don't really feel like romance readers feel like, "I'm looking for great historical romance, I'm going to go check out the Vivians." Not because those books aren't maybe great, but-
Jennifer Prokop 00:45:21 / #: Right. They're going to go to the bookstore and look at the table. Right.
Radclyffe 00:45:25 / #: Well, I will tell you that one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was winning The PRISM because that's not my audience. That made a difference to me. They didn't know me at all, I'm a name on a book that they would not recognize. So I knew that when I won that, that said that my work was a good work. And that meant a lot to me as an author.
00:45:54 / #: In terms of, I guess, the thing that makes me feel like I've made an impression in the publishing and the world of queer fiction is all the authors that I've published and how well they've all done. They have surpassed me on every level hundreds of times. And when people say, "What's your legacy?" That's my legacy. They are. And so it doesn't matter if I'm forgotten, they won't be, because there's too many of them.
Jennifer Prokop 00:46:28 / #: When we do think about your books though, do you think there's a hallmark of what makes a Radclyffe romance?
Radclyffe 00:46:35 / #: I've thought about that because we talk about branding a lot, and I think so. I remember that I read at the York Lesbian Arts Festival in the UK or in the mid-2000s I guess, and I read, and the person who was moderating said, "Oh, it's all about the characters for you, isn't it?" And I looked at her and I said, "Of course," because I think that is, to me, what it's all about is the characters. And I think that that's what pulls the reader in and holds the reader.
00:47:11 / #: So I think that they remember. I know that readers remember my characters because they write to me and they talk about them by name, like they're real people. I think that when I think of my work, then I don't know that readers will actually recognize it, but I write archetypes. I specifically write hero archetypes, and I always have. And that gets back to the little kid who wanted to be the sheriff and who wanted to be the one.
00:47:39 / #: I wanted to put women in positions of authority and power. So I write about positions of responsibility more than power. I like to write about people who are responsible for others at cost to themselves. To me, that makes a hero. So many of my works, and they're not all military or law enforcement, but they're people who have assumed responsibility and they're generally wounded. So I write wounded heroes who are saved by love.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:10 / #: I love it.
Radclyffe 00:48:11 / #: Because that to me is a romance. That's what I wrote, read as a kid, and that's what I write. I mean, is there anything better than that?
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:18 / #: No.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:20 / #: I'm a simple woman.
Radclyffe 00:48:21 / #: Yeah, totally.
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:22 / #: No, is the answer.
Sarah MacLean 00:48:24 / #: So do you have a book that is the most popular with your readers? You have one that is a fan favorite?
Radclyffe 00:48:33 / #: I totally do. I totally do. I mean, they always-
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:36 / #: And we all do. We all make that face.
Radclyffe 00:48:39 / #: And is it like one of the first ones you ever wrote?
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:40 / #: It's the first one.
Radclyffe 00:48:43 / #: Because mine is, yeah. And it's like, "What happened after that? You just fell apart?"
Jennifer Prokop 00:48:48 / #: This makes me feel better.
Radclyffe 00:48:50 / #: Mine is Fated Love. I wrote it. It was one of the first ones that was really widely disseminated, so that may be part of it, but it was published in 2004 and absolutely almost everybody picks that book.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:07 / #: I'm going to tell you two why you all are crazy. It's because when a person who has been reading for a long time decides to finally write a romance what they are doing, and every single person who has gone on to write many books after that first one has said, "I wrote in this book the things I wanted to see."
Radclyffe 00:49:30 / #: It's true.
Jennifer Prokop 00:49:32 / #: And I am going to tell you right now, that is why they resonate with readers, not because it's the best book you've ever written, because it is the book of your heart. And our hearts are all looking for a lot of similar things. So it's not that we don't think you've grown and changed and written great books. It's that first book is often so steeped in the kind of longing for the story that you desperately wanted to read. That is why we love them.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:02 / #: It is, it's a love letter.
Radclyffe 00:50:03 / #: So why can't we do it again?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:04 / #: I know, "What have you done for me lately, Jen?"
Radclyffe 00:50:06 / #: Why aren't we doing that every time?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:07 / #: Well, because, look, then you all are like, "Okay, but now there's a market and now there's the possibility of disappointing readers. And now I have to find new readers." It's, right-
Radclyffe 00:50:16 / #: And I have to write better sentences.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:18 / #: Yes.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:20 / #: That's nonsensical.
Radclyffe 00:50:20 / #: And I have to pay attention to my point of view.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:22 / #: Exactly.
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:23 / #: Sorry.
Sarah MacLean 00:50:23 / #: Head hopping, what's that?
Jennifer Prokop 00:50:24 / #: Sorry for explaining the world to you two. I don't know what is even going on.
Radclyffe 00:50:30 / #: It's the first book I wrote with a kid, and I think that it was one of my earliest books, but I didn't want to write children because I was absolutely certain that I couldn't write children, but I decided that I would. Not a young child, but I think when I started, she was nine. I've written five in this universe since then because these characters are so popular.
00:50:51 / #: And it was a book about family, and I think that that's what people really loved. I mean, it was a romance, a really emotional romance, but it was also about family and community. So it hit a lot of buttons. That's the one that people like the most. I think one of your questions was, if I could pick one book to be remembered by, I think it would be one of the ones I wrote most recently, because I think it's better written. So I'd rather be remembered by that. And it also kind of comes full circle for me. It's my take on du Maurier's Rebecca, which is one of the most formative books of my life. I read a lot of gothic romance when I was young.
Sarah MacLean 00:51:38 / #: That's why you love a wounded hero, Radclyffe.
Radclyffe 00:51:40 / #: Totally.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:41 / #: Serious, hello?
Sarah MacLean 00:51:41 / #: Right there. That's imprinted on you.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:46 / #: Okay, is the cover a woman running away from a house? Because-
Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: It should be.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:47 / #: ... that is my paragram.
Radclyffe 00:51:47 / #: No, it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's this one right here. It's this one.
Jennifer Prokop 00:51:56 / #: Unrivaled, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:51:56 / #: It's a medical romance, but it has many of the themes of Rebecca. Actually, the other one is Jane Eyre. And one of the first books I wrote is called Love's Melody Lost. So one of the very first ones I wrote is based on Jane Eyre, and this one is du Maurier, 66 books just there in between. But yeah, I really like gothic romances.
Sarah MacLean 00:52:22 / #: Well, the book is Unrivaled. Because you feel like Bold Strokes is such a part of your legacy, I wonder if you could talk... I have the same question about Bold Strokes that I did about your own books. Is there one moment of Bold Strokes that you can point to as, "This is the time when we knew we would succeed at this, we knew that we could make this work. This is the book that we knew or the author?" Is there some sort of turning point for you that you can point to? The answer may be no, but-
Radclyffe 00:52:57 / #: I think the answer is no. Really. It's an organic sort of body of people and work that simply has grown and never stopped. But from the very beginning when there were just five of us and then there were 10 of us, and then 25 of us, we were connected. And I think that that's what made me realize and our books were really good and people really liked them. And I think the success of our early titles sort of confirmed for me that we were on the right road.
00:53:36 / #: And we've continued to really push and have a lot of the most popular authors that are publishing, writing queer stuff today. And we're expanding all the time, and we have many more diverse authors and diverse stories. So we're growing. We never have stagnated.
Jennifer Prokop 00:53:54 / #: So you talked about the discoverability problem and print on demand. And so when the Kindle came online, when eBooks really became a thing, and for those of you who are five years old or whatever, I'm sorry, I don't mean that I'm old. I remember for years they were like, "There's going to be digital books one day," and we were all like, "Whatever." And then boom there were. Did that help with discoverability? Did that change your business model when books became available directly to people?
Radclyffe 00:54:25 / #: Yeah, totally. Actually, I'm a big numbers person. I believe in the numbers. And so I've looked at a lot of these things and presented some of these things. And when the Kindle came out, and then the iPad shortly after, it became very apparent to me that we needed this platform. And I asked our eBook tech, who at the time was just making PDFs that we were selling from a web store. So I got a contract with both Amazon and iTunes right away, and I said, "Tony," I said, "We need to convert our catalog." Well, we had 800 titles then, and she did it in six weeks.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:06 / #: What?
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:07 / #: Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:08 / #: That's unbelievable.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:09 / #: And there you go, right? There you go.
Radclyffe 00:55:13 / #: And see, when you're an independent publisher, you can move.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:15 / #: So nimble. Yeah.
Radclyffe 00:55:15 / #: The next year, we saw a 30% increase in our backlist sales, in our backlist title sales.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:21 / #: Now what year do you feel like this was?
Radclyffe 00:55:25 / #: 2010, 2011.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:26 / #: Yeah, it was right. I mean, that felt like that it was electric that time.
Jennifer Prokop 00:55:30 / #: It was electric.
Sarah MacLean 00:55:30 / #: And it was the Wild West in a lot of ways in that if you had a Kindle or if you had a Sony eReader, which is what I had to start, you were just reading whatever there was. I mean, I think people who now come to romance and come to independent publishing have no frame of reference for how little there was at the beginning, which is why so many of these authors and publishers who were on the early crest of this wave-
Jennifer Prokop 00:56:02 / #: Early adopters.
Sarah MacLean 00:56:03 / #: ... were making so much money. I mean, because we would read everything.
Radclyffe 00:56:09 / #: The thing that was so important for us is that we could reach the community that didn't have access to us before. It's been both a blessing and a curse for queer publishing because I think that digital publishing has destroyed the network of queer bookstores. In the '70s and '80s and '90s, there were probably 1,200 feminist and queer bookstores in the United States, and now there's probably less than 10. I mean, they just cannot survive because there's not enough concentration of readers.
00:56:48 / #: Womencrafts in Provincetown is one of the oldest still existing, and I mean, they're still going strong, but Giovanni's is gone. I mean, in all the major cities, they're gone. Because there's not enough in that one place to buy print. So we're reaching more readers, but it's flipped the paradigm. So eBooks are selling much more than print, which is true for genre fiction and romance in particular, which everybody knows. And that's a loss. That's a tremendous loss for us not to have those bookstores anymore.
Sarah MacLean 00:57:23 / #: Where is the community finding books?
Radclyffe 00:57:26 / #: Well, they find them online like most readers, but very fortunately for us, they find them with us because we have our own web store. We send out all our new release newsletters, we discount our titles so that they can find them. We do daily bargains. We do every possible thing we can to get our books to our readers. But interestingly enough, the vast majority of readers are still getting them outside of our direct connections. They're still getting them. They're looking on the internet. They're hopefully going to bookstores and finding them there, because we still do release all of our titles in print and libraries. We have a pretty good library distribution, both eBook and paperback. So they find them the way everybody else finds them.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:19 / #: Yeah, but it is sad to lose the community of booksellers.
Radclyffe 00:58:23 / #: It's very tough.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:25 / #: And also, we didn't talk about this, but you have one of the largest collections of lesbian romance in the world, in your house, behind you.
Jennifer Prokop 00:58:35 / #: [inaudible 00:58:35 / #] behind you.
Radclyffe 00:58:35 / #: There's 2,000 books right there behind me.
Sarah MacLean 00:58:38 / #: I feel like we should take a picture of this. I'm going to take a picture of you. Let's take this, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:58:42 / #: This is a little tiny piece of the set, eight bookcases, that I started collecting every single one that I could find throughout the country after that first book in 1972. And then I went back and found some of the older ones. And then very honestly, probably eight or nine years ago, one, I ran out of space. Number two, very happily, there were so many coming out that I couldn't read them all at once.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:08 / #: You couldn't do it anymore, yeah.
Radclyffe 00:59:08 / #: And so a lot of them now, I just read on Kindle or I read on the iPad, but I have them, they're 40 years old now, some of them. But this is the lifeblood behind me. This is what, for our community-
Sarah MacLean 00:59:28 / #: This is what you've bathed in the blood of?
Radclyffe 00:59:29 / #: ... this is life giving. That's I am bathed in the blood.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:31 / #: I love that.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:35 / #: Well done. What a way to end.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:38 / #: Radclyffe, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:38 / #: It was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:41 / #: Thanks for telling us your stories.
Radclyffe 00:59:43 / #: I hope it was enjoyable for everybody who's listening too.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:48 / #: If people aren't interested in this, then they just aren't us because I can't get enough of it.
Radclyffe 00:59:53 / #: I know, I could talk about it forever.
Jennifer Prokop 00:59:53 / #: Forever. Forever.
Sarah MacLean 00:59:56 / #: Yeah, yeah. I have a feeling that every one of these interviews is just going to be-
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:03 / #: They're amazing.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:04 / #: ... better than the next. It's crazy how great they all are.
Jennifer Prokop 01:00:07 / #: It really is amazing. I think one of the things that really struck me, there are so many about this conversation is once again, the real importance of representation.
Sarah MacLean 01:00:18 / #: Yeah, and also the idea of how she thinks about her own books and the archetypes that she writes, reflecting herself and other people. And talk about somebody who understands why she's sitting down every day. And I think that is a struggle for some of us, but it's not for her. And interestingly, I mean not to spoil who else we have coming and what else we have planned, but I think one of the things that I'm already seeing just so early in the conversations that we're having is these people all know why they sit down every day, and that is a huge piece of the puzzle, I think.
01:00:56 / #: I do just want to shout out, also, we talked about this during the Sandra Brown episode or after the Sandra Brown episode, but again, this sense of community. This idea that the work for so many of these trailblazers is to lift up other voices and to help other people come to the table. And that's really cool.
Jennifer Prokop 01:01:15 / #: This question of the losing of queer bookstores, we talk a lot about, okay, the Kindle revolution has meant that your reading can be private, but that in this particular case, it has also taken away a space that has been so powerful in the queer community.
01:01:37 / #: And when she talked about not being able to put books on the shelves in P-Town, right? And so that whole question of books on the shelves is one, I think, that you and I offline talk about all the time, "Where are people finding romance on the shelves?" And that is something that is even more urgent. And I think really is so interesting to hear that perspective from Radclyffe.
Sarah MacLean 01:02:04 / #: Well, and this idea of losing queer bookstores being scary in a lot of ways. Like this idea that these bookstores, and we all know this intuitively as readers, that bookstores, libraries, these are usually safe spaces for us to do our exploration around identity. But for queer kids, for LGBTQIA+ kids, these are spaces that when they're lost, they are a loss, a more powerful loss.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:36 / #: This is also one of our first Trailblazer episodes where someone had a really different full-time job and was writing on the side. So you don't know who else we've interviewed or those people didn't talk about their other job. But being a doctor and then becoming a romance writer is sort of just for-
Sarah MacLean 01:02:58 / #: And publisher.
Jennifer Prokop 01:02:59 / #: And publisher, right? And so that journey, I think also just goes to show that romance is so powerful for so many people that it's a way of really expressing something that's deep in our hearts. And I was just really interested in hearing that, I really liked that.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:21 / #: Can I also say Radclyffe was the first writer we've had who we've talked across all four seasons where we talked about writing, and she spoke about it as something that she did to relax that she never expected anybody to look at?
Jennifer Prokop 01:03:40 / #: Right, right.
Sarah MacLean 01:03:41 / #: And I'm really charmed by that. And I know that she's not the only one out there, but often we fall into this mythology of like, well, people write in order for other people to read. But Radclyffe was really writing for herself first. And I think that also gets back to this question of representation and identity and experience. But I think that's really fabulous. And I think if you're out there and you're just writing for yourself, that's fine too.
Jennifer Prokop 01:04:08 / #: Yeah, and I think one of the things, and we have had Christina and Lauren on to talk about FanFic. We have talked with Adriana and Alexis who are also big FanFic people. And Adriana especially has talked really explicitly about how fan fiction, these are spaces where marginalized characters can get the full treatment of their humanity.
01:04:33 / #: And so it was also really interesting to think about the ways in which those are avenues where we are going to have so many amazing writers coming up through as, "I wrote this for me, because I wanted to see these characters have a happily ever after, or I wanted to see them experience love the way I feel love." So just really, I think, that was not a surprise to me at all to hear that she'd had a little dabbling in FanFic also in her story.
Sarah MacLean 01:04:59 / #: Yeah, those cowboy books. I love it, I want them. Anyway, everyone, this is Fated Mates. You have been listening to a Trailblazer episode. We're doing those in addition to our regular read-alongs and interstitial episodes over the course of season four and maybe beyond.
01:05:16 / #: We're trying very hard to add to the romance history here, along with other podcasts that are doing the same thing. You should head over, speaking of other podcasts that are doing the same thing, to Julie Moody-Freeman's Black Romance podcast where she has been doing this for several seasons with Black romance writers.
01:05:34 / #: And you can otherwise hang out with us, FatedMates.net. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at FatedMates and at FatedMatesPod respectively. You can find gear and stickers and links to other cool stuff at the website. And otherwise, head over to your pod catching app, your favorite one, and like and follow us there. And you will never miss an episode of us in your ear holes.