Lambda Lit Awards Handed Out in Chicago - 4471 - Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News

Pictured At the Lammy Awards, from left: Chicago author C.C. Carter, Honoree E. Lynn Harris, and Lisa Moore and Jim Marks of The Lambda Literary Foundation. Photo by Tracy Baim

The recipients of the 16th Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced June 3 at a gala dinner in Chicago.

Veteran novelist Christopher Bram received the Gay Men's Fiction Award for Lives of the Circus Animals, a comedy set in the New York theater world. The Lesbian Fiction Award went to Nina Revoyr's Southland, a study of the intersections of race and class in Los Angeles.

'It was a very meaningful evening displaying the energy, excitement, mission and purpose of our community's literary work,' said Lambda Literary Foundation Executive Director Jim Marks.

The evening was international in scope, with Necrologue, edited by Helen Sandler and published by England's Millvres Prowler Group, receiving a Science Fiction/ Fantasy/ Horror Award, while the second Independent LGBT Press Award went to Millvres Press in recognition of the scope and quality of its output.

Among the more memorable moments came when Raymond Luczak accepted one of three Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation fiction awards. Luczak, who is deaf, spoke about the genesis of book, when he his circle of friends began dying of AIDS in the 1980s and he sat beside the bed of the last of them, who asked him, 'When I am dead, who will tell our stories?'

Stanford University professor Terry Castle, receiving the Editor's Choice award for her monumental The Literature of Lesbianism, looked back to another pioneering work which had inspired her 10 years of research and writing, Kinsey Institute Librarian's Jeanette Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature, first published in 1956. The longevity and struggle of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender literary movement was also reflected in the Pioneer Award selection of Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis, Minn., the first feminist bookstore, now one of a relative handful remaining from a once thriving community of similar stores.

An emotional highlight also came when bestselling author E. Lynn Harris received the Lambda Literary Foundation Bridge Builder Award, recognizing his memoir, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? Harris spoke of belonging to two families, the African-American community and the gay community. 'Having received this award, and four NAACP image awards, I feel like both my families claim me,' he said.

See www.lambdalit.org

Award Recipients:

Children, Young Adult

Boy Meets Boy, by David Levithan. (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

LGBT Humor

Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-forms to Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel. (Alyson)

LGBT Drama

Prok, by Brian Drader (Scirocco Drama)

LGBT Erotica category

Best Lesbian Erotica 2004, ed. by Tristan Toarmino. (Cleis Press)

Science Fiction/Fantasy / Horror

Necrologue, edited by Helen Sandler. (Diva)

Spirituality

Keeping Faith, by Fenton Johnson. (Houghton Mifflin)

Visual Arts

Women Seeing Women, edited by Lonthar Schirmer. (W.W. Norton)

LGBT Romance (tie)

Last Summer, by Michael Thomas Ford. (Kensington Publishing)

Maybe Next Time, by Karin Kallmaker. (Bella)

Pictured At the Lammy Awards, from left: Chicago author C.C. Carter, Honoree E. Lynn Harris, and Lisa Moore and Jim Marks of The Lambda Literary Foundation. Photo by Tracy Baim

LGBT Fiction Anthology

Pulp Friction, edited by Michael Bronski (St. Martin's Press)

LGBT NonFiction Anthology

Queer Crips, edited by Bob Guter and Robert Killacky (Harrington Park Press)

Gay Men's Mystery

Blind Eye, by John Morgan Wilson (St. Martin's)

Lesbian Mystery Category

Damn Straight, by Elizabeth Sims (Alyson Publications)

LGBT Biography

Beautiful Shadow, by Andrew Wilson (Bloomsbury)

LGBT Memoir/Autobiography

Naked in the Promised Land, by Lillian Faderman (Houghton Mifflin)