Got an email this morning from Erin McHugh, author of The Portable Queer. There’s a reading on November 27th
I was pointed your way — or towards Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn — by Samantha, the events person at the Barnes & Noble on Park Slope. I’m reading there on Tuesday night, November 27, at 7:30 p.m. and when I told her I had few friends in the neighborhood, her first words were, “Get on the blog, babe!”
So let me tell you just a bit about my books, THE PORTABLE QUEER, and perhaps you’ll toss in a mention of my B&N reading — I would be most grateful. In fact, they’ll be appearing in th Holiday Gift Guide in TimeOutNewYork this week, so they’re getting some great attention.
THE PORTABLE QUEER is a trio of smart gay gift books: one is a book of quotes, one vignettes of gay history, and the third full of biographical sketches. They’re $12.95 each, and you can take a look at them on Amazon (they recently reached #1 in the category’s hot new releases) or bn.com in all their glory. I was featured on Larry Flick’s show on Sirius Radio the other morning, too, for those of our friends who were driving around looking for a parking space!
EDGEnewyork.com, a terrific gay site, called them “A great choice for the upcoming holiday season” in a fabulous review last week:
Somewhat postcard sized with brightly colored covers sporting what could easily become the new queer crest (think Hogwarts!), The Portable Queer is a collection of very concise coffee table (or pocket, or Christmas stockings) books that contains a clever and didactic compilation of data that you should already know but of course don’t because you have been too busy “reading” PerezHilton.com.
The series, put together by Erin McHugh, balances a great deal of information both from the annals of history and from the more mundane stocks of pop culture, you know, all the stuff we gays are made of. Many of the phrases or characters presented here you have probably already run across at some point of your varying-degree of rainbow colored life, but it is great to have our own version of Cliff notes in such a fun, bite-size way.
McHugh creates the perfect middle ground for both the bookworm and the tabloid fan, with all the variations of queer readers in between, but the biggest merit of The Portable Queer is how useful it can be to introduce friends and foes, fag hags and gay bashers to queer culture.