The fall’s been so busy with book promotion and our reading tour that I forgot to plug a new anthology from SRP called The Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South edited by my good friend Douglas Ray.
When Douglas first told me about the project back in 2013 when I was visiting his students at Indian Springs, he asked if I had anything he could consider. I didn’t think I did, and then recalled a poem I wrote in South Beach, Miami back in 2007, June 7, thirty years after Anita Bryant’s unfortunate but successful referendum to repeal Dade County Ordinance 77-4, the law that outlawed discrimination against gays and lesbians in employment, housing, and public services.
The poem’s called “The Light, the Idea of Light, Repeats Itself at South Beach” and while it’s not Key West, it’s full of nods to Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf and to Mark Doty’s “An Island Sheaf: Key West.”
If you’re in NYC on Saturday, December 6th, there will be a “Queer South” contributors’ reading at The Bureau (Room 210 at The Center, 13th St).