Daniel Curzon (born March 19, 1938)
Daniel Curzon (born March 19, 1938) is the pen name of Daniel R. Brown. He is the author of Something You Do in the Dark, first published by G. P. Putnam in 1971 and which may be considered as one of the first gay protest novels. It is the story of a gay man's attempt to avenge his entrapment by a Detroit vice squad police officer by murdering him.
Curzon has written other novels, including The Misadventures of Tim McPick (original title: Queer Comedy), From Violent Men, Among the Carnivores, The World Can Break Your Heart, Curzon in Love, The Bubble Reputation, or Shakespeare Lives!, and What a Tangled Web. His non-fiction books include The Big Book of In-Your-Face Gay Etiquette and Dropping Names: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon. This last was described by Ian Young in Torso as "ferociously honest and very funny" and by Philip Clark in Lambda Book Report as "a blunt, hilarious, page-turning ride that is...impossible to put down."
Curzon edited and published the early homophile magazine "Gay Literature: A New Journal" in 1975 and 1976. The magazine included poetry, fiction, literary reviews, essays, photography, and short plays. Curzon's own written work sometimes was included. Curzon contributed articles for other magazines such as "Gay Times" in 1976 and "Alternate" in 1978.
In the theater, Curzon won the 1999 National New Play Contest for Godot Arrives, and has won many other play contests, such as the Great Platte River Play Contest. His play My Unknown Son was produced off-Broadway at the Circle Rep Lab in 1987 and at the Kaufmann Theatre in 1988, as well as in Los Angeles in 1997. Baker's Plays published Curzon's one-act play, A Fool's Audition. Seven volumes of his Collected Plays have been published as POD books through BookSurge.
Curzon is currently a retired professor of English.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_CurzonSomething You Do in the Dark has been described (in Amazon.com) as ―the first gay protest novel‖ and as a ―revenge novel with a social protest theme. Georges-Michel Sarotte, in his literary study Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin (1978), called Dark ―a well-written, lucid, intelligent and militant novel and Cole himself ―the faithful image of the American - the Western - homosexual of the 1970s. When I first read Dark 29 years ago, I viewed Cole Ruffner as a post-Stonewall, ―angry young gay who was informed by the new gay militancy. However, as Curzon himself said in a recent published conversation with his life partner John W. Gettys,
When I wrote Something You Do in the Dark, I had never heard of the Stonewall Rebellion in NYC or gay liberation. People wrongly think one event caused all the subsequent events. I just knew that I was a good person and the world was saying I was so despicable that we couldn‘t even discuss what you people do sexually. It took me until the age of twenty-six to overcome this social disapproval and become a sexual human being.
[...]
Like Curzon‘s other great novels - 1978's Among the Carnivores and 1984's The World Can Break Your Heart - Something You Do in the Dark is a hard-hitting novel that tells it as it is, not as we want it to be. This novel‘s (and its author‘s) refusal to compromise is perhaps why it has been out of print for much of the past 35 years. Most recently republished by Curzon himself through his own IGNA Press, Something You Do in the Dark deserves to be back in print, and to be read by a new generation of avid gay readers. --Jesse Monteagudo, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered
Daniel Curzon, 1988, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1123767)American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)
Further Readings:
DROPPING NAMES: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon by Daniel Curzon
Paperback: 302 pages
Publisher: IGNA Books (May 24, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0930650174
ISBN-13: 978-0930650179
Amazon: DROPPING NAMES: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon
What it felt like struggling to establish and maintain a literary and social foothold in a hostile world.
The Big Book of In-Your-Face Gay Etiquette by Daniel Curzon
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: IGNA Books (November 15, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0930650190
ISBN-13: 978-0930650193
Amazon: The Big Book of In-Your-Face Gay Etiquette
A spoof of manuals of "proper" social behavior -- an update and expansion of the 1982 Joyful Blue Book of Gracious Gay Etiquette
More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices
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