A Very Special Episode of homo-centric: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Jan 22nd!

Used to be that January was boring.  After the holiday rush that began with everyone trying to remember Grandma's stuffing recipe through New Year's when someone inevitably drinks too much and grabs the wrong person to kiss at midnight, January gets the bad rap of being boring.  Bleak, cold, empty, no presents, short days & credit card bills for presents nobody remembers.

Not anymore.  homo-centric is super duper excited to smother your January blahs with the only Los Angeles bookstore appearance of Mattilda Bernsten Sycamore!  Mattilda is coming to town Sunday January 22nd at 6:30pm to tell you all about/read from/publicize her new book Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots.  Yeah, we're as excited as you now!  Everything! is! exclamation! pointed!  The book is being released in February but the cover blurbs alone - by Edmund White, Samuel Delaney & Justin Vivian Bond - are three orders to go buy the book when it comes out.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is a writer, editor, activist, artist, filmmaker, critic and troublemaker.  Most recently, she is the editor of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, which will be released on Valentine's Day 2012 from AK Press.  Mattilda is the author of two novels, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008) and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003). She is the editor of four additional nonfiction anthologies, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007),That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2004; 2008), Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving (Haworth 2004), and Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write about Their Clients (Haworth 2000), which now also appears in Italian (Effepi Libri 2007).  Mattilda recently finished a soon-to-be-published memoir called The End of San Francisco.

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! This anthology reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. 


So join us Sunday January 22nd at 6:30pm at Stories Books and Cafe.  The event is free.  The map to Stories is here.