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| Michael Denneny | |
Michael Denneny, "an openly gay editor at a major New York publisher who started a pioneering imprint that was devoted to LGBT literature and who helped found a magazine billed as a gay version of the New Yorker," died April 15, the New York Times reported. He was 80. For almost 30 years, Denneny "multitasked his way through a jampacked publishing career." His successes included Judith Thurman's biography Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1982); G. Gordon Liddy's memoir Will (1980); and Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On (1987).
In 1976, Denneny and Chuck Ortleb started Christopher Street, a monthly magazine that would publish fiction and nonfiction by gay writers for the next 19 years. "It was a risky personal move for Mr. Denneny, the rare openly gay editor in a publishing industry in which many gay and lesbian editors were still closeted," the Times wrote. By then, he was an editor at Macmillan, where he published a book version of Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, which had its premiere in 1976."
In 1977, Denneny was fired "when Macmillan's chief executive discovered that he had acquired The Homosexuals by Alan Ebert, which featured interviews with 17 gay men," the Times noted, adding that he "was rehired briefly to present the book at a sales conference when no other editors would. The book was published--but he was fired again, this time when his connection to Christopher Street became known."
While hunting for jobs, he presented his interviewers with a copy of the magazine and informed each prospective employer that he was gay. His only job offer came from the president of St. Martin's Press, Tom McCormack. Denneny said he believed there was a new market for gay fiction.
One of his early acquisitions for St. Martin's was Edmund White's second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978). "Nocturnes was rejected by everybody," White said. "I couldn't get anybody to publish me again until my agent approached Michael. He was very generous, very smart and was very intellectual, but not in a show-offy way."
In 1987, Denneny started Stonewall Inn Editions, an LGBT trade paperback imprint at St. Martin's that republished many of the gay and lesbian books he had previously released in hardcover.
"Stonewall created a definition for gay books and gave a visibility that gay books had never had in the past, which were previously published by obscure houses or self-published," said Robert Weil, executive editor and v-p of the Liveright imprint at Norton. "Every gay man of that era knew Stonewall.... No one had the influence and vision... in spite of everything, to say that it was OK to be gay, and he made that mark through publishing."
Stonewall's paperbacks include Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog by Paul Monette (1988); Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist by Larry Kramer (1994); and Shilts's The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1988).
Denneny left St. Martin's in 2002 to become a freelance editor. Over the past few years, he worked on his memoir, On Christopher Street: Life, Sex and Death After Stonewall, which was published by the University of Chicago Press last month. "And when the great disaster of AIDS overwhelmed us," he wrote in the book. "I thought I saw a heroic era in gay and lesbian history and an absolutely shining moment in gay writing, something truly worth remembering."