Florida Agenda

BY Terri Schlichenmeyer

Is it so horrible to know what you want? You don’t think so. That’s why you’re decisive, you state your needs clearly and firmly, and you expect people to act accordingly. What’s wrong with that?

Nothing. So why do people call you the “B” word that rhymes with itch?  You’re not nasty or horrible, so why would they call you a diva? Author Sheryl Lee Ralph doesn’t know the answer. But, as she says in her new book “Redefining Diva,” if they call you that last name, you really should thank them.

Okay, so you’re a diva. What is that, anyhow? The word, says Ralph, has gotten a bum rap lately, but it was originally an Italian noun derived from the Latin word for deity; in other words, a diva is a goddess. Ralph also says that the word is an acronym for Divinely Inspired Victoriously Anointed. A diva, says Ralph, “copies no one. She is her own woman.”

Ralph became a diva through a lifetime of observing strong women. Her mother, a Jamaican immigrant, worked in a hospital to pay for her ticket to America. Ralph’s grandmother, a North Carolina belle, was headstrong and fearless enough to tussle with the burglars who killed her husband.  Divas, you see, know that risks are to be seized.

At sixteen, Ralph took on a big risk when she went to Rutgers University. She had initially considered going to medical school, but she hated dissecting. She switched to law school, but considered it “boring.” Then Ralph stumbled into drama auditions, tried out for a play, and found her niche. When a Diva discovers what she’s meant to do, Ralph says, she knows it.

After working with the Defense Department, she landed in Hollywood and the movies, but Broadway was her first love. Good Diva that she is, she tackled every opportunity, which eventually gained her a part as one of the original “Dreamgirls,” in the stage show. She ultimately quit the show, went back to Hollywood, and enjoyed more fame on television. Today, Ralph still acts, because Divas know “yes” can be satisfying. She also works with the Diva Foundation, an organization that focuses on HIV/AIDS awareness and testing. She does it to memorialize her friends and because, she says, a “real Diva counts…her blessings.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect when “Redefining Diva” crossed my desk. Is it a memoir? Or is it meant to inspire? The answer to that, delightfully, is both. Author Sheryl Lee Ralph weaves a lot of advice into this biography, giving readers plenty of takeaways while she shares tales of family, fame and folly.  And that’s what makes this book so enjoyable: Ralph imparts life lessons in between star-studded gossip and her own personal experiences, on-stage and off. Advisements are wrapped inside anecdotes, which somehow make them more memorable and definitely more fun to read. I liked this book, and I think you will, too. Read “Redefining Diva” for the advice. Read it for the biography. Either way, this’ll be a book you’ll want to read.

By Greg Shapiro

In spite of a wildly moody weather pattern (cold for five minutes, then hot for the next three hours), spring is in the air in South Florida, and 2012 promises to be a prolific year for gay writers and authors of LGBT-interest fiction and non-fiction. You will want to get your spring cleaning kicked off early this year to make room on your newly-dusted shelves for some of the literary gems.

If you can, try and catch the inimitable Brad Goreski, author of Born to Be Brad: My Life and Style, So Far and star of “Bravo’s” “It’s a Brad, Brad World,” and “The Rachel Zoe Project,” appearing tonight (March 8) at Books & Books on South Beach, 927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach.

Here’s a selection of page-turning mind candy to engage the most finicky of LGBT reading tastes:

Literary Delights

•    Coral Glynn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $25) Peter Cameron’s first novel since his acclaimed Young Adult (Y/A) novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, is set in 1950s England examines how victims of circumstance learn to love one another.
•    In the Y/A novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Harper Collins,2012,$17.99), Emily M. Danforth tells of the experience of a young lesbian dealing with being queer while staying with her ultra-religious aunt following the death of her parents in a car accident.
•    Software engineer turned writer, lesbian novelist Ellen Ullman’s By Blood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, $27), set in the gritty, early ‘70s of San Francisco, involves thin walls, eavesdropping, and a patient, her therapist and a quest for identity.
•    Teenage criminals Sarah, Jenna, Lauren and Cassie are sent to an experimental juvenile detention center on a farm to create something tangible – as three of the girls try to heal their wounds, one sets out to destroy everything they work for in Getting Somewhere (Penguin Young Readers, 2012, $ 17.99) by Beth Neff.
•    Monstress (Ecco, 2012, $13.99), award-winning, queer, Filipino writer Lysley Tenorio’s debut story collection includes the National Magazine Award-nominated titular story among the eight pieces.
•    In his West Virginia-set debut novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury, 2012, $15), Carter Sickels introduces us to Cole, a nursing home aid and part-time drug dealer, whose interactions with the town folk, including an openly gay ex-con, are the basis of the story.
•    Acclaimed gay essayist and poet Wayne Koestenbaum returns with Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background (Turtle Point, 2012, $10.50), his first poetry collection since 2006’s Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films.
•    The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard (The Library of America, 2012, $35), edited by Ron Padgett, with an introduction by Paul Auster, includes the late gay writer’s groundbreaking autobiographical piece I Remember, as well as poems, short plays, drawings and comic strips, stories, journal entries and more.
•    Controversial and prolific queer writer Dennis Cooper returns with The Marbled Swarm (Harper Collins, 2011, $14.99), in which a young cannibal (yes, you read that right), tells the story of him and his late father.
•    High school sweethearts, Nate and Adam’s relationship survived the strains of homophobic brutality, but as college life begins in different cities their love is put to the test when new people enter their lives, forcing them to recognize what they really want in J.H. Trumble’s novel, Don’t Let Me Go (Kensington Books, 2012, $15).
•    The adult-oriented parody, If You Give A Kid A Cookie, Will He Shut the Fuck Up? (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011, $14.99), an honest tale of a parent just wanting to find peace with his noisy kids by Marcy Roznick, fills the void between the books Go the F**k to Sleep and If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
•     “Sweep-you-off-your-feet” stories by Steve Berman, Simon Sheppard, Rob Rosen and ten other gay writers can be found between the covers of Best Gay Romance 2012 (Cleis Press, 2012, $14.95), edited by Richard LaBonte.

Non-fiction now…

•    As colorful and stylish as the man himself, Brad Goreski’s Born To Be Brad: My Life and Style, So Far (It Books, 2012, $24.99), is a combination memoir and style guide, full of personal stories, photos and style tips from the gay star of Bravo’s reality shows It’s a Brad, Brad World and The Rachel Zoe Project.
•    Edited by Audrey Bilger and Michele Kort, Here Come the Brides!: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage (Seal Press, 2012, $17), features contributions by Jennifer Camper, Holly Hughes, Joan Lipkin, Phyllis Lyon, Lesléa Newman, Monica Palacios and Lydia Stryk,
among others.
•    Neil Hegarty’s The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012, $27.99), includes the Emerald Isle’s 1990s decriminalization of homosexuality.
•    Published posthumously, The Weather in Proust (Duke University Press, 2012, $23.95) by gay studies pioneer and literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is a collection of pieces, edited by her friend and literary executor Jonathan Goldberg, of her work in the final years of her life, before she died of breast cancer in 2009.
•    As a devoted father, husband and professor at the Orthodox Jewish campus, Yeshiva University, Joy Ladin shares her transitions from a man to a woman in Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, $26.95).
•    Princess Noire: The Tumul-tuous Reign of Nina Simone (The University of North Carolina Press, 2012, $22) by Nadine Cohodas is a thorough biography of the late soul diva, musician, songwriter and civil rights activist.
•    Particularly timely in light of the recent changes regarding gays in the military, Out Of Step by retired journalist J. Lee Watton (A&M Books, 2011 $17) takes readers back 45 years to the Office of Naval Intelligence’s gay witch hunt to tell the true story of what happened during the summer of 1965.
•    The updated and expanded edition of John-Manuel Andriote’s acclaimed and Lambda Literary Award-winning 1999 book “Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America” (jmandriote.com, 2011), includes a revised preface and an entirely new chapter, “The Plague Continues,” inspired by the author’s own HIV diagnosis in 2005.
•    Described as “the definitive collection of writing” by a “pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies,” the substantial Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2012, $23.95), compiles some of Gayle S. Rubins’s “most influential essays.”
•    Including more than a dozen pages of color photos, It’s Not Really About the Hair (!t Books, 2011/2012, $14.99) by Tabatha Coffey with Richard Buskin, the memoir by the out lesbian host of “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover” is now in a paperback edition.
•    The Good, the Bad and the God-Awful: 21st Century Movie Reviews (Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011, $21.99) by Kurt Loder (of Rolling Stone and MTV fame) contains more than 200 movie reviews including some with queer content (The Nomi Song, Chloe, Savage Grace, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, among others), as well as films from out filmmakers (I’m Not There, D.E.B.S., Broken Embraces and Burlesque).

Greg Shapiro is a Chicago-based writer and contributor to the Florida Agenda.  Gregg writes about music, literature and pop culture.