“Literature is crucial to our lives; reading is fun.” So said Stan Leventhal, a prolific author, editor and publisher who made a major impact on gay writing in the 1980s and until his death from AIDS in 1995. He was nominated for three Lambda Literary Awards, one for each of his first three novels. He wrote many reviews, started a gay publishing house, encouraged writers and readers to celebrate queer stories.
Michele Karlsberg, a close friend and business partner, writes: “He was a literary activist who always gave to, built and endorsed literary writers.” I like that term: “literary activist”: it comes through in a video with a gay cable TV show from 1991 in which the soft-spoken, seriously handsome 40 y/o was interviewed about The Black Marble Pool.
Sarah Schulman, another New York friend, mourned his passing in an emotional essay “Through the Looking Glass”. She recalled: “Stan was a great friend. He liked to have a Jack Daniels and a cigarette; he took AZT with bourbon sometimes. A tall skinny guy, clean shaven with short brown hair, he was kind of a hippie, wore a jean jacket, T-shirt and had a backpack. Stan read everything and was one of the first men I’d met who actually read lesbian fiction and loved it.”
Some of his work reflects the horror of the times, the deathly onslaught of gay friends and lovers during the worst of the HIV years, particularly deeply felt in major cities like New York, when a verified infection was a literal death sentence. It’s no accident this “literary activist” was also a figure in gay politics, in ACT UP.
Michael Bronski, a chronicler of gay literature wrote about Leventhal in “Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility”: “Like Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, [Hard Candy, a book of Stan’s short stories] relies on plain-spoken language to convey the multiplicity and depth of lived experience.”
Some of his writing is in a lighter vein, especially The Black Marble Pool, a murder mystery set in Key West in which a music critic is handed an assignment to do a travel piece for his New York editor and sent to the gay vacation hot spot. Settling in to a cosy guest house the first evening, a body turns up, quite dead, in the bottom of an empty pool. Our hero quickly becomes sleuth, and various quirky characters make as appearance, most not quite what they appear to be. And then there is the hunky closeted beat cop ….
The best essay about Stan on the net is from an Indian screenwriter writer Paras S Borgohain who bought a dog-eared copy of Skydiving on Christopher Street in Delhi in 1999 and became entranced — almost obsessed — with learning more about this unique voice. In his 2013 blog post he asks: “Can an author and extreme philanthropist be so consumed by continually giving, building and endorsing, that his own craft dies a slow, unassuming death?” https://paroospeak.wordpress.com/…/mind-sport-bondage-and-…/
Elise Rolle has also posted about Stan in her ongoing gaypedia of arts and culture. https://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/1412817.html
In time for the 25th anniversary of his death, a California-based partnership, ReQueered Tales, tracked down Stan Leventhal’s executors and acquired world rights to republish his work in e-book form (with an option for print). The Black Marble Pool is being released Aug 15, Mountain Climbing in Sheridan Square is set for Winter 2020 with more to follow.
THE BLACK MARBLE POOL is for sale at:
Amazon: https://amzn.to/33EYCc1
Kobo: https://bit.ly/2L4BJqj
Nook: https://bit.ly/2Z7Pnhf
Apple iBooks: https://apple.co/2OZO8AU
