Jim Provenzano | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 6, 1961 New York City, New York, U.S. |
Jim Provenzano (born December 6, 1961) is an American author, playwright, photographer and currently an editor with the Bay Area Reporter .
Jim Provenzano | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | December 6, 1961 New York City, New York, U.S. |
Jim Provenzano (born December 6, 1961) is an American author, playwright, photographer and currently an editor with the Bay Area Reporter .
Born in Queens, New York, Provenzano was raised in Ashland, Ohio and attended Kent State University from 1979–80 as a theater major, a summer internship at Porthouse Theatre in Akron, where he performed the title role in a 1980 production of The Who's musical Tommy.
After transferring to Ohio State University in 1981, he graduated with a bachelor of fine arts in dance in 1985. While a student, he created stage works and video adaptations of dances, performed in works by fellow students and guest teachers Mark Taylor, Stephen Koester, Terry Creach. He received summer scholarships from the Dayton Ballet and Bill Evans Dance Company at Allegheny College.
In 1985-1986 he lived in Pittsburgh and worked and toured with the Pittsburgh Dance Alloy. He also directed two Sam Shepard plays, Cowboy Mouth and Action as well as original performance works, in his rented expansive loft with theater seats.
After moving to New York City in 1986, he performed with various modern dance choreographers, including Steve Gross and Bill Cratty, touring with Cratty's company for a year, and at The Yard on Martha's Vineyard in 1987.
Provenzano created his own dance, music and performance works from 1987–92 in New York and performed at Franklin Furnace, P.S. 122, Dance Theatre Workshop, Highways in Santa Monica, and several other venues. In 1988, he directed a New Jersey production of As Is. With a fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, he wrote, composed and set-designed the musical, Under the River, set in the World Trade Center's PATH station. It played at the Ohio Theatre in September 1998, produced with Theatre Tweed.
In 1989 he began working as the publisher's assistant for OutWeek magazine and also contributed his first news and arts stories for editors Michelangelo Signorile, Sarah Pettit, and Gabriel Rotello. In 1990, he became the editor of the publication's offshoot Hunt, an entertainment weekly, before both publications folded in July 1991.
Many of his former coworkers, including Dale Peck, Troy Masters and Walter Armstrong went on to continue publishing journalism and novels. During that time, he was also a member of both ACT UP and Queer Nation, participating in protests for both organizations. He also wrote freelance arts features for Frontiers , The Advocate , High Performance and San Francisco Sentinel , including interviews with Clive Barker, Chita Rivera, and Paul Bartel.
Provenzano moved to San Francisco after visiting in 1992, when he was offered a position as an assistant editor for the Bay Area Reporter. He completed a language certificate at Florence's Scuola Leonardo da Vinci in 1995. In 1997, Provenzano completed a master of arts degree in English/creative writing at San Francisco State University.
In 1996 then-Bay Area Reporter editor Mike Salinas asked him to write a sports column to cover the LGBT athletics community. Among the publication's first sports writers was Gay Games cofounder Tom Waddell.
Sports Complex was published weekly until 2006. The column was internationally syndicated from 2004–06. Among the topics covered were the controversies of the California AIDSRide, financial controversies and accomplishments of the Gay Games and Outgames, as well as interviews with, and articles about gay and lesbian athletes, including Esera Tuaolo, Jerry Smith, Glenn Burke, David Kopay, Billie Jean King, Greg Louganis, and several gay and lesbian Olympic athletes. Provenzano has frequently been interviewed in print, television, radio and films for his expertise on the LGBT athletics movement.
Provenzano is also the author of seven novels, most notably PINS (1999) about gay high school wrestlers. The book was included in more than a dozen college reading lists, and remained among the top ten bestselling gay fiction titles in 2000. Provenzano often trained, competed and medaled with the Golden Gate Wrestling Club from 1992 to 2006. He also competed and medaled in track and field events with the San Francisco Track & Field Club from 2003-2006.
After being commissioned to adapt PINS to the stage, the work premiered at New Conservatory Theatre Center, running from August through September 2002. A Chicago staging took place in 2006.
In 2003, Provenzano published Monkey Suits, about gay cater-waiters in 1980s Manhattan, and Cyclizen (2007) about a gay bicycle messenger in 1990s New York City, which both fictionalize his experiences in AIDS activism. Nearly two dozen anthologies published from 1998 to 2007 include his short stories and essays.
In 2005, Provenzano was asked to guest-curate the world's first gay sports exhibit, Sporting Life: GLBT Athletics and Cultural Change from the 1960s to Today for the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. The exhibit displayed hundreds of items from more than 40 teams, and was extended through 2006.
Provenzano returned as an Editor with the Bay Area Reporter in September 2006. In May, 2010, he co-created and became editor of BARtab, the Reporters (initially monthly, now weekly) LGBT nightlife guide. In March 2020, he was promoted to Arts & Entertainment Editor at the Bay Area Reporter.
In December 2011, he published his fourth novel, Every Time I Think of You, about two gay teenage athletes in the 1970s, one of whom becomes paraplegic. The novel won a Lambda Literary Award in 2012.
March 20, 2014, he published Message of Love, the sequel to Every Time I Think of You, where in Philadelphia, the lead characters Reid and Everett go through their early 1980s college years at both Temple University and University of Pennsylvania as the AIDS epidemic approaches. The novel was selected as a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2015.
In May, 2016, he published Forty Wild Crushes; stories.
In 2018, he contracted with Beautiful Dreamer Press to publish his sixth novel, Now I'm Here, with a September 2018 publication. Set mostly in rural Ohio in the 1970s and 1980s, it focuses on the lives of Joshua, a gay piano prodigy who gains fame for his piano solo version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," and his relationship with David, the son of a pumpkin farmer.
In June 2020, he published audiobook adaptations of his novels Every Time I Think of You and Message of Love with narrator Michael Wetherbee.
In September 2020, his seventh novel, Finding Tulsa, was released with Palm Drive Publishing. The expansive novel is the faux-memoir of gay film director Stan Grozniak, who reconnects with Lance, his teenage crush from a 1970s summer theatre production of the musical Gypsy.
Through 2021, as part of the Bay Area Reporters 50th anniversary celebrations, he produced and hosted twelve monthly panels about the history of the newspaper, with dozens of current and former writers, editors, photographers and special guests. The panels are archived on the B.A.R.'s YouTube channel.
In May 2022, he edited and self-published The Lost of New York, a novel written more than 50 years ago by his late uncle, John "Butch" Rigney, Jr.
Provenzano is openly gay. He currently lives in San Francisco.
Michael Angel Nava is an American attorney and writer. He has worked on the staff for the California Supreme Court, and ran for a Superior Court position in 2010. He authored a ten-volume mystery series featuring Henry Rios, an openly gay protagonist who is a criminal defense lawyer. His novels have received seven Lambda Literary Awards and critical acclaim in the GLBT and Latino communities.
Edmund Valentine White III is an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and an essayist on literary and social topics. Since 1999 he has been a professor at Princeton University. France made him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
The Bay Area Reporter is a free weekly LGBT newspaper serving the LGBT communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is one of the largest-circulation LGBT newspapers in the United States, and the country's oldest continuously published newspaper of its kind.
Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai American playwright. He has written many plays which have been produced in the United States and won several distinctive awards, including a PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Drama.
Noël Alumit is an American novelist, actor, and activist. He was identified as one of the Top 100 Influential Gay People by Out Magazine.
Kevin Howard Scott Sessums is an American author, editor and actor.
Toby Johnson is an American novelist and writer in the field of gay spirituality.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Erastes is the pen name of a female author from the United Kingdom, known for writing gay-themed historical and romantic fiction.
Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, editor, and playwright primarily of LGBT literature. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009.
John Joseph "Jack" Fritscher is an American author, university professor, historian, and social activist known internationally for his fiction, erotica and non-fiction analyses of popular culture and gay male culture. A pre-Stonewall riots activist, he was an out and founding member of the Journal of Popular Culture. Fritscher was the founding San Francisco editor-in-chief of Drummer magazine.
Tim and Pete is the third novel written by James Robert Baker (1946–1997), an American author of sharply satirical, predominantly gay-themed transgressional fiction. A native Californian, his work is set almost entirely in Southern California. After graduating from UCLA, he began his career as a screenwriter, but became disillusioned and started writing novels instead. Though he garnered fame for his books Fuel-Injected Dreams and Boy Wonder, after the controversy surrounding publication of his novel, Tim and Pete, he faced increasing difficulty having his work published. According to his boyfriend, this was a contributing factor in his suicide. Baker's work has achieved cult status in the years since his death, and two additional novels have been posthumously published. As of 2006, first editions of Adrenaline, Boy Wonder, Fuel-Injected Dreams and Tim and Pete have become collector's items and command high prices at rare book stores. First-edition copies of his earlier works have become collector's items.
Wuvable Oaf is an indie comic book series by American artist and writer Ed Luce, under his Goteblüd Comics imprint. The central story follows the title character, Oaf Jadwiga, as he searches for love in a city that is never explicitly named, but is based on San Francisco. A number of subplots include Oaf's bizarre relationship with his cats and obsession with disco grindcore band Eja©uloid, whose lead singer Eiffel is Oaf's primary love interest. The comic also presents an extensive supporting cast of characters, many of whom have starred in their own spin-off stories and mini-comics.
Jameson Currier is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, journalist, editor, and publisher.
Dirk Vanden, born Richard Fullmer, was an American author and illustrator. He is considered the first gay Mormon writer and has been called a "pioneer of gay literature" by the Lambda Literary Review. A graduate of the University of Utah, his work appeared in ONE Magazine, Vector, and California Scene, as well as in Latter-Gay Saints: An Anthology of Gay Mormon Fiction. His novel I Want It All was the first book to explore San Francisco's leather subculture. His greatest success was his All trilogy: I Want It All,All or Nothing, and All Is Well. Vanden received a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica in 2012 for the revision of this trilogy, All Together.
Ed Luce is an American cartoonist, best known for his indie comics series Wuvable Oaf. The series focuses on Oaf Jadwiga, a bearish gay ex-wrestler looking for love. Originally funded by a grant from Prism Comics, it was self-published in five standalone chapters until being compiled in graphic novel form by Fantagraphics Books in 2015.
Shawn Stewart Ruff is an American novelist and editor, who won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction at the 21st Lambda Literary Awards in 2008 for his debut novel Finlater. He has since published the novels Toss and Whirl and Pass (2010) and GJS II (2016), and the novella One/10th (2013).
Julián Delgado Lopera is a queer Colombian writer and performer. They are the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! an illustrated collection of queer immigrant histories in the United States during the 1980s. They use creative expressions, such as writing, queer literary performance, and bilingual poetry to advance LGBT activism projects across the Bay Area. Delgado Lopera serves as the Executive/Artistic director for the nonprofit organization Radar Productions since 2015.
John Morgan Wilson is an American journalist and author of crime fiction, notably the Benjamin Justice mystery novels. The books feature a reclusive ex-reporter, ruined by a Pulitzer scandal and haunted by personal loss, who operates out of West Hollywood West Hollywood, California, becoming enmeshed in murder investigations in and around Los Angeles.
Brent Calderwood is an American journalist, author, and activist. He was named by Out magazine in the magazine’s annual “Out 100” issues, identifying important LGBT newsmakers in both 1995 and 2014. His writing and activism on behalf of LGBTQ youth is documented in the films The Butch Factor and Now We Can Dance: The Story of the Hayward Gay Prom, as well as the television program Lifestories with Gabrielle Carteris. His first book, The God of Longing, was recommended by the American Library Association in 2014 and is housed in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
