From Closet to Classic: Ann Bannon and Cecilia Tan Discuss 20th Century Lesbian Pulp & Erotica

I’m very excited and honored to be doing this online talk with Ann Bannon, the legendary author of the Beebo Brinker books, the foundational novels of the lesbian pulp genre in the 20th century. (I’m still getting a kick out of talking about the 20th century like it was a long time ago! If only!) The Rare Book library at the University of Illinois is hosting us on Zoom, so you don’t have to be at UofI to attend!

To get the Zoom link invite, sign up here: https://go.illinois.edu/closet

The official description: 

Please join the Rare Book & Manuscript Library via Zoom for a conversation between two of the most influential writers in lesbian pulp and erotic fiction of the 20th century.

Ann Weldy, better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is the author of a series of five lesbian pulp novels known as “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.” Written from 1957 to 1962, the books were bestsellers when they were first released, and have had remarkable longevity, especially for genre fiction. They have been published in five different editions and in several languages and are often taught in women’s studies and LGBT studies courses. The books’ popularity and impact have earned Ann Bannon the title of “Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” as well as numerous awards for pioneering gay and lesbian literature. A play based on her books has been produced twice in New York and now all over the country, from Boston to Seattle.

Cecilia Tan is an award-winning writer of science fiction/fantasy, romance, and erotica, and a 2010 inductee to the Saints & Sinners LGBT Writers Hall of Fame. Her books include Bent for Leather, Black Feathers, and the Magic University series, named by Autostraddle a “Trans-Inclusive Fantasy Series for Harry Potter Fans.” Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Strange Horizons.

Please join us!

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

So. This was the year that my cat died, my Dad died, and I got COVID. I keep saying I’ve been getting no writing done. But that’s not exactly true…?

It’s mostly that I haven’t been progressing on the Big, Important Novel Series that has occupied the center of my writing life for the past decade (aka the Vanished Chronicles), so it doesn’t FEEL like I got “any” writing done. Certainly in comparison to the years when I had three books (maybe even four?) come out, while publishing a serial with 2-3 chapters per week, plus short stories, my output is minuscule when juxtaposed. It also feels like I didn’t “write” much because much of what DID come out this year were “inventory” stories, which had been sitting around in the hard drive waiting for their final polish or rewrite. But they all count, don’t they?

They do.

So here’s a recap of everything I wrote in 2023. 

BENT FOR LEATHER and the story “Personalize Your Netherparts”

This year has been a slow rollout for my new short story collection, Bent for Leather. I say “slow rollout” because the initial goal was to publish in April to coincide with my keynote at International Ms. Leather and Bootblack (IMsLBB). An IMsL edition was printed, but to fulfill the Kickstarter stretch goals, two new pieces of interior art needed to be commissioned and then completed by the artist. So it took until September to get that edition finished and uploaded, and my plan had been to do the “official” launch in November.

But I got COVID in September so all I managed in October and November was to ship the copies due to backers. I didn’t do any of the marketing I had planned. I haven’t had the brain cells.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

Summer beach reading season is almost here, and so is the release of a new anthology from 17 authors in Passionate Ink, including myself! Passionate Ink is the leading organization for erotica and erotic romance authors (and was founded by Sylvia Day back in the day!) and we’re getting together this collection of delicious novellas and stories as a charity for ProLiteracy. The cover is revealed TODAY!~ and pre-order links are going live! Scroll on down…

Set your summer beach read list on fire with seventeen scrumptious stories in one BIG package.

Join Passionate Ink’s celebration of all things summer with their release of “Hot & Sticky.” These steamy shorts will heat you up, wet you down, and make you melt. From historical dalliances, fantasy monsters, shifters, and sci-fi, to fated mates, friends to lovers, and parties of two (or why choose), there’s a perfect flavor to fill your ice cream cone.

Authors Ryley Banks, David Camily, Lil DeVille, W.D. Drames, Jordyn Kross, Darah Lace, Katherine McLellan, Minette Moreau, Leslie Morris Noyes, Michal Scott, Belle Sloane, Cecilia Tan, Vixey Todd, Marie Tuhart, Mandy Valentine, Cadence Vonn, and Sharla Wylde have joined together to create this scorching summer-themed collection. Proceeds for this anthology will be donated to ProLiteracy. ProLiteracy is the leading resource and champion for adult education and literacy worldwide.

My own story in this one is a steampunk erotic novella that has made the rounds to various steampunk anthology and magazine editors over the past 10 years or so, all of whom said that the writing and historical / alternate history details were wonderful… but it was WAAAAAYYYY too sexy for their publications. Story of my life, eh? Then along came this anthology and it just seemed like a perfect fit. I’ll post more about it in a separate post, but for now, it’s called “The Blossoming of Summer” and you can preorder it with the links below the cut and above the now-revealed cover!

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

This morning was the ICFA panel on “Editing Beyond the Non-Western World,” which was intended to feature guest of honor Oghenechovwe Donal Ekpeki, as well as myself, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Clarke, and moderator Mimi Mondal. As it has turned out, Oghenechovwe was detained when he traveled to the USA to attend the NAACP Image Awards and denied a visa for entry, meaning he could not attend ICFA, either. And I am missing the convention also, even though I’m currently only a 90-minute drive away, because I’m in the Tampa area where my father’s health is failing. (He was giving last rites in the hospital a few days ago when his doctors believed his expiration was imminent, so I cancelled my plans to go to Orlando, but now that he is home and having home hospice care, he seems to be holding up…! Thank you everyone for all your good wishes and prayers!)

Although the panel room had no WIFI, Mimi had the idea to try to bring us into the panel via Zoom using her own cellular data plan, and this effort was largely successful, but in many ways was a perfect metaphor for the difficulties of publishing writers from outside the USA or Great Britain. One common theme of the panel’s remarks was that there are systemic and logistical barriers to entry for writers from the non-Western world, including issues with currency conversion and difficulty of access to markets and source materials. And another theme was how often the only entities redressing the situation were individuals applying their own resources.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

Guess what I did? I launched a Kickstarter in the wee hours, hoping to be able to publish a collection of my queerest, kinkiest short stories in time for International Ms. Leather and Bootblack in April.

My previous short story collections have jumbled my kinky and vanilla erotica together, and have also mixed my heterosexual stories with my queer ones. BENT FOR LEATHER, the title I’ve chosen for this one, is specifically the stories that inhabit the particular queer corner of the leather bar in my soul where my lesbian, butch, and transmasculine characters hang out.

Over on the Kickstarter campaign page I’ve listed the table of contents, and I’ve described a bit more about my aspirations for this book… as well as why it took until I put this table of contents together to realize that my own relationship to my gender has always been one of my central themes. I feel like it’s only in the past 5-6 years that I really have been dealing with my “gender stuff,” but obviously, it’s been there all along.

The main thing I’d like to spend the Kickstarter money on is professional proofreading, design, and layout. If we exceed the initial goal, the stretch goal I’d really like to hit is the one that makes me write an all new story to add to the book. That would of course be the most fun of all!

Please help me spread the word if you are able to.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

Now that I finally posted last year’s Duck Day notes and photos, I can do this year’s, which had the theme of “Bistronomy.” This year’s meal had the constraint on it that we were going to be in Singapore for the TwoSet Violin concert and wouldn’t get back until basically 6 days before Thanksgiving — functionally 5 days since jet lag wiped out an entire day — and normally we would have to start more than a week in advance to both source all the ingredients and do other prep of pickling, growing sprouts or herbs, etc etc. So we knew we had to keep ourselves from getting too ambitious, and we wouldn’t have time to run test recipes.

As it turns out, we’ve got so much stuff in our larders and already in process, though, and have stockpiled so many cooking techniques over the past several years, that we could pull it off in 5 days without straining ourselves too badly.

This year’s meal was highly influenced by last year’s trip to Paris. (The trip to Singapore was of course also an influence but there’s no way we were going to come home and try to work out Peranakan cuisine in 5 days, so it’s only there in a few spots.) In addition to the fancy ADMO dinner, we also managed to eat at Septime, one of the leading restaurants in the “bistronomy” movement. If you are from the Boston area you might have eaten at Journeyman, which was also a very bistronomic place. The Green Goddess in New Orleans was another notable US entry to this type of restaurant, and my fave is Edison Food Lab, Jeanie Pierola’s original place in Tampa (still there!).

“Bistronomy” was coined when various chefs, trained in the usual French haute cuisine style, found themselves not wanting to spend seven figures on tableware and having to have a huge staff needed for the typical fancy restaurant, and instead preparing a hyperlocal, constantly changing menu in more casual settings. (I’d almost call it “food forward” if it weren’t ludicrous to imply that stuffier, more traditional restaurants were not somehow also about the food…?)

Among the hallmarks of bistronomy: pickling your own stuff in house, growing your own herbs (since you are a small place and not trying to do 200+ covers a night…), inventive “outside the box” fusion…. heeyyyyyy, does this not sound like the way corwin and I cook and eat all the time?? A second theme emerged, though, which was basically: reuse – recycle – repurpose.

So he bought the Bistronomy book by Jane Sigel (get it on Bookshop, Amazon, Indie boosktores) just to look at recipes and read up on the history a bit more, and we planned our menu while jaunting around Singapore. (I think we were at the Michelin-starred restaurant Meta, which is deeply Korean while at the same time being very much in the French tradition of fine dining, when we came up with most of the menu.)

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

So, corwin and I went to Paris (yes, France) in December 2021, to celebrate our 30th anniversary and also to celebrate our latest booster shots and go somewhere that still had COVID regulations in place that made sense to us. (Of course we know so much more now about re-infection and all, but this post is not about that.) At the time I posted a long twitter thread with lots of photos but who knows if Twitter is even going to be around or functional soon, so I’m reposting here, with some tweaks for blog format:

So, the big thing that got us out of our semi-quarantine and all the way to Paris was some friends invited us to join them for what promised to be a stellar meal, a tasting menu worthy of corwin and my 30th anniversary. So, yes, here is a food porn thread!

It’s my first time in Paris, and we had been here a few days already before the night of the big dinner, but hadn’t made it over toward the Eiffel Tower yet. We took the Metro from our hotel in the 11th arrondissement and came up to a stunning view.

The Eiffel Tower at night, across a moonlit river Seine, is pretty hard to beat. Our destination was just across the water, where a couple of the world’s most decorated chefs have set up for 100 nights. You can’t really call that a “pop up,” can you?

Alain Ducasse, the current leader in most Michelin stars, Albert Adria, of el Bulli fame, and some of their associates, collaborated on this unique gastronomical effort and they dubbed it ADMO and situated it in the Musee du Jacques Chirac.

I’d love to talk about nothing but the food, but really it’s not possible to discuss the meal or ADMO without the context, and that context is COVID and the tremendous impact on the restaurant industry, on travel, on the food supply, and on how people gather.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

So when I heard my longtime literary agent and now publisher of Riverdale Avenue Books, Lori Perkins, was going to try to launch a line of books called The Binge Watcher’s Guides, and she was going to want to sign up many writers to each do their favorite TV and film series, I jumped on the chance to be the one to write the book on the Harry Potter movies!

To get the book and series off the ground, we’re running a Kickstarter, which will help to not only pay me a good rate, but raise the money needed for the kind of promotion and publicity necessary to compete in today’s book publishing market, which is tougher than ever. The campaign launched Wednesday, topped its first thousand dollars by Friday, and is well on the way to not only making the initial goal but hopefully reaching the all-important stretch goals, too!

To back the campaign: http://bit.ly/HPbingewatch

Among the rewards, which of course include the book, I’m also offering some virtual tarot card readings, and some other really fun stuff, like recipe cards for foods and drinks to make and serve at your Harry Potter movie marathon party!

The book includes tons of research I did, including dozens of fascinating casting stories, film-making innovations, and analysis of the place of the film series as a force in modern pop culture.

I’ve also got tips for throwing a binge-watch party, and advice on how and when to introduce the films to children for the first time. And of course recaps of each film, and a section for film fans on things you might want to know from the books.

Among the things I had forgotten until I went and looked back at it was the fact that the first film debuted right after the September 11th attacks. I think we were all ready for a little escape into a magical world at that point…

And I think during the pandemic people are looking to escape again, only this time from the safety of our own living rooms. There’s never been a better time to do a binge watch of a series, really.

So if you’d like to re-live the magic of discovering the Harry Potter films for the first time, or if you ARE discovering the films for the first time, come along with me to Hogwarts and beyond!

All backers get a discount off the regular retail price of the book and/or ebook, as well as exclusive rewards that can only be gotten through the Kickstarter.

Click to support: http://bit.ly/HPbingewatch

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.