I thank the Lambda Literary Foundation for this award. It’s especially strengthening at a time when I’m so ill. I was moved to learn that Board members hadn’t known I was ill when they made their decision about this award.
I have several associations with the word “pioneer.” The best, the one you clearly intend, is trail blazing. I’m not the first same-sex-loving, gender-variant novelist, hirstorian, journalist, essayist or poet to make art. And for millenia, art rendered on every continent has explored themes that are described in today’s English-language terms as same-sex love, transsexuality, intersexuality and gender variance–in narratives spoken, rhymed, signed, sung, chanted, acted, danced, smelted, sculpted, drawn, painted, carved, etched, cast and written. In the long, long history of our cooperative human past, story tellers/teachers/hirstorians played a social role, passing on communal knowledge harvested by group labor.
[continued at absent cause]
Filed under: Fighting oppression, Must read
