ALA Releases 2009 Rainbow List

If you’re in need of some well-written and wonderfully illustrated gay-themed books, you’re in luck. The Rainbow Project has just released the 2009 Rainbow List, featuring books with authentic and significant gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered/questioning (GLBTQ) content for youth from birth through age 18.

This year’s bibliography includes 34 titles, published in the last 18 months, and represents a broad range of GLBTQ experiences. Most titles are recommended for teens, including four titles published for adults. Two picture books, two middle-grade novels, two graphic books (a novel and a biography), one short story collection, one translation, and five nonfiction titles are also represented.

The titles on this year’s list offer young readers rich characters and portray the full spectrum of youth and family experiences. Primary characters are gay, lesbian, transgendered, questioning, and straight, and they grapple with varying degrees of acceptance and prejudice from their friends, families, and communities, as well as from themselves.

Four titles stood out to the selection committee as especially deserving of recognition for their characters, stories, quality of writing, and illustration:

Down to the Bone (HarperTeen, 2008) by Mayra Lazara Dole; 10,000 Dresses(Seven Stories Press, 2008), by Marcus Ewert and illustrated by Rex Ray; Last Exit to Normal (Knopf, 2008) by Michael Harmon; and Skim (Groundwood, 2008) by Mariko Tamaki with art by Jillian Tamaki.

The list is a joint partnership between the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table and Social Responsibilities Round Table.

More information can be found on the Rainbow Project blog, MySpace, and Facebook (search: rainbow list).

Rainbow Final List – 2009 Picture Books 
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.(Putnam) by Sarah Brannen
10,000 Dresses (Seven Stories Press) by Marcus Ewert

Middle/Early Young Adult Fiction 
No Castles Here (Random) by A.C.E. Bauer
After Tupac & D Foster (Putnam) by Jacqueline Woodson

Young Adult Fiction 
Girl from Mars (Groundwood) by Shelley Tanaka.
Debbie Harry Sings in French (Holt) by Meagan Brothers
Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List (Knopf) by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Down to the Bone (HarperTeen) by Mayra Lazara Dole
Big Big Sky (Red Deep Press) by Kristyn Dunnion
Suicide Notes (HarperTeen) by Michael Thomas Ford
Fancy White Trash (Viking) by Marjetta Geerling
Two Parties, One Tux, and a Very Short Film About The Grapes of Wrath (Bloomsbury) by Steven Goldman
Map of Ireland (Scribner) by Stephanie Grant
Nothing Pink (Front St) by Mark Hardy
Last Exit to Normal (Knopf) by Michael Harmon
M+O 4EVR (Houghton) by Tonya Cherie Hegamin
Another Kind of Cowboy (HarperTeen) by Susan Juby
My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, & Fenway Park (Dial) by Steve Kluger
Out of the Pocket (Dutton) by Bill Konigsberg
Gravity (Orca) by Leanne Lieberman
My Tiki Girl (Dutton) by Jennifer McMahon
Belinda’s Obsession (Lobster) by Patricia Penny
Sword Masters (Dragon Moon) by Selina Rosen
Crossover (Orca) by Jeff Rud
Entrances and Exits (Simon Pulse) by Paul Ruditis
Skim (Groundwood) by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
What They Always Tell Us (Delacorte) by Martin Wilson
Love & Lies: Marisol’s Story (S & S) by Ellen Wittlinger

Nonfiction 
Gay America: Struggle for Equality (Abrams/Amulet) by Linas Alsenas
The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy (St. Martin’s) by Robert Leleux
Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeannette Howard Foster (DaCapo) by Joanne Passet
Two Truths and a Lie: A Memoir (Homofactus) by Scott Turner Schofield

Awkward and Definition (S & S) by Ariel Schrag

Writing Sample: Dialogue

"Sleep While I Drive"

10 minute play

2 characters

1 male (race/ethnicity unspecified - "whiteboy" reference can be an insult)

1 female (Native American and/or Latina heritage)

Jim and Ana take a tour into the unknown in a 1959 Cadillac, and talk sex, porn, love, and sociology.

Commissioned by and workshopped at the 2009 Brave New Works Festival, Emory University.

You Can Sleep While I Drive

'Becoming a Man' all powerful | ajc.com

photo by Alain Fonterey

By Wendell Brock

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

THEATER REVIEW

“Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps”

Grade: A-

8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. 5 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday. 7 Stages. 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org. (Note: Features adult material and full-frontal nudity.)

Bottom line: One of the year’s most essential theater experiences.

As a camp counselor in Costa Rica a few years ago, Scott Turner Schofield suffered a serious blow to the head that required a detailed medical examination and extended hospital stay. When his doctor realized the athletic young man had the body of a woman, he thought the kid was just confused.

“Son, you have a terrible brain injury,” the doctor said sternly.

After having a heart-to-heart conversation with another doctor about his quest for a sex change, Schofield was informed that Costa Rica is the cosmetic-surgery capital of Latin America. And the surgeon offered to remove his breasts on the spot.

In his autobiographical solo performance piece, “Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps,” the Atlanta-based artist describes the comic absurdity, social stigma, emotional imperilment and sheer-naked vulnerability of the transgendered life.

Suggesting an image of physical rebirth, the show begins with Schofield emerging from a cocoon of billowing fabric suspended from the ceiling. After a precarious aerial ballet, he bounds to the floor like some newly minted Peter Pan and describes the messy medical details of getting a sex change. In a metaphorical gesture that signifies the total soul-baring to come, he disrobes completely and tapes a sign to the set that says: “No secrets allowed.”

By turns fiercely comic, brutally honest and deeply moving, the show is beautifully written, choreographed and performed. Like some sexually ambiguous Scheherazade, Schofield unspools the action as a series of stories chosen willy-nilly by the audience from a list of numbers assigned to various words (“queer,” “straight,” “butch,” “femme,” etc.). Directed by Steve Bailey, the intermissionless 75-minute piece feels so artfully balanced and delicately nuanced that it makes you wonder if Schofield really has 127 stories in his repertoire or is just pretending.

From the little girl forced to wear a Minnie Mouse costume when she really wanted to be Mickey to the young man standing in front of a Texas judge begging to have his sexual designation legally changed, from the complicated family relationships to the three suicide attempts, “Becoming a Man” is raw, urgent and honest. Much to his credit, Schofield comes across more as a lovable neighborhood kid bursting with energy and insight than an agenda-waving political zealot.

With great humor and pathos, he describes his alienation from his biological father, relates his adventures as a baby sitter and describes his close calls with Atlanta cops and skinny-dipping European males. During the performance, he sings “Like a Bird on a Wire” while tethered to a swinging rope, and has a live telephone conversation with his stepfather.

In a democracy that boasts great freedom of expression, transgenderism may be the final frontier of sexual politics. Going from female to male can’t be an easy process, and this 27-year-old artist never pretends that is. Schofield —- winner of an off-Broadway Fruitie Award and a prestigious Princess Grace Foundation acting fellowship —-says the titular number 127 is part of his Social Security number, and jokes that he wants someone to steal his identity. As it turns out, the man born as Katie Lauren Kilborn has sculpted a personality so unique that it would be virtually impossible to replicate.

Originally posted here: 'Becoming a Man' all powerful | ajc.com
'via Blog this'

Two Truths and a Lie On Sale Now!

HomofactusPRESS

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE

Scott Turner Schofield

15.00 BUY NOW 

Two Truths and a Lie is a memoir passing as three solo plays written and performed by Scott Turner Schofield.

Details

Two Truths and a Lie is a memoir passing as three solo plays written and performed by Scott Turner Schofield. From inside his young life on the Homecoming Court and Debutante Ball circuit (in a dress), armed with only a decoder ring and a gifted tongue, Schofield comes out with truly unbelievable stories of a body in search of an identity. By turns slapstick and slap-to-the-face, this drama invites audiences and readers to explore gender, sex, sexuality, and self in their own first person.

“I am completely mad for Scott Turner Schofield. He is a thrilling, compelling, and downright charming writer and performance artist. And handsome.Did I mention handsome? And smart. Buy this book. Read it.” - Kate Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World

“Scott is amazingly clever at drawing people into his perspective with a light and engaging style, yet his work really challenges us to rethink our set perspectives on gender.” - Robert Rosenberg, Director of Before Stonewall

ISBN

978-0978597320

Publication Year

2008

Binding

Perfect

Pages

128

Format

Text with 6 photographs

Retail Price

US $15.00 \ UK £8.00 \ EURO €12.00 \ CAN $15.75 \ AUS $17.00

Designer

Cover: Scott Turner Schofield/Book: Jay Sennett

Author Details

Scott Turner Schofield began his performance art career working as a research assistant to Holly Hughes and Carmelita Tropicana at the WOW Café in 2000. Now a full-time performance artist, educator, and producer, he tours his acclaimed one-trannie shows, “Underground Transit”, “Debutante Balls”, and “Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps” nationwide.

Editor's Pick in Time Out New York!

Fancy that

Scott Turner Schofield returns to the cotillion for Debutante Balls.

By Mark BlankenshipWed Jul 11 2007

SKIRT THE ISSUE Stradling genders onstage was crucial to Schofield's vision.

Playwright and performance artist Scott Turner Schofield has come out in at least five different ways. When he was in high school—and was still living as a woman named Katie—he came out as a lesbian. In college at Atlanta's Emory University (where he and this writer were classmates), he came out as transgender. But while those are powerful stories, they may be less surprising than the events that inspired Schofield's latest show: As a young woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, Schofield came out at three debutante balls as a Southern belle.

For those who don't know Dixie, the debutante ball is an annual Old South tradition in which young women put on elegant gowns, get paraded around mansions by tuxedoed young men and symbolically announce that they are ready to join society. For the debs, this ritual is called "coming out," and the joke is not lost on Schofield. His solo piece Debutante Balls—which he performs twice this week at the Cherry Lane Theater as part of the queercentric Fresh Fruit Festival—pokes fun at the similarities between his time in cotillion culture and his journey within the realm of gender politics.

Schofield has unwittingly broken rules in both worlds. Consider, for instance, the story of his debutante gown: As a middle-class kid who didn't arrive in the South until his teens, he didn't know that upper-crust debs usually attend balls in white dresses and kid gloves. So what was his coming out attire? A spaghetti-strapped number with a long black skirt and a leopard-print bodice. Blanche DuBois would have died.

"But it was the only dress I owned!" he says, chatting via instant message from a theater workshop in Serbia after the telephone stopped working in the middle of this interview. "I bought it at a nice place at the mall! How was I supposed to know?" he asks. "Like with gender, you only know you're doing it wrong as you do it wrong."

Schofield wears the frock during a crucial scene in Debutante Balls to explicitly symbolize his time as a woman. For most of his audiences, both queer and straight, he says the transformation scene is "a magical moment," but there are some who don't want him to acknowledge his feminine past.

"Some trans people feel that being trans is a birth defect that they've corrected through various medical interventions, and now they are living as the men and women they were truly meant to be," he explains. "They get angry at being considered anything else."

But for Schofield, it's crucial to keep identifying himself as trans and not just as a man. "I rail against the system that says we can't be all of ourselves," he says. "I think trans people especially have something special to say."

Ironically, since he's on hormone therapy and passes as a man, Schofield now regularly "comes out" as someone who wasn't born male. That wrinkle only strengthens his artistic mission.

"The major point of Debutante Balls is to highlight the ways we can all come out as things," he explains. "We can be sodefined. We can define ourselves out of our own truths, so we should trouble those notions and be all over them. It should not be possible for me to be a radical feminist debutante transman, but I am."

Schofield's perspective, which he has toured across the country since 2004, complements the rest of Fresh Fruit, whose fifth season runs through July 22. Several of the festival's other titles also hinge on gender and the various meanings of "coming out."

Lucile Scott's play Monroe Bound, running Saturday 14 through Tuesday 17, depicts an entire family facing its own identity issues, while British performer Joey Hateley uses his multimedia solo show A. Gender (July 21 and 22) to subvert both male and female archetypes.

Fresh Fruit artistic director Carol Polcovar is happy that the fest features multiple riffs on the same theme. "We tend to have pockets in our community that stay together and don't know about anyone else," she says. "I want people to 'get it,' to see that we're all coming at the same thing from unique places."

Debutante Balls is Thu 12 and Fri 13. The Fresh Fruit Festival runs at the Cherry Lane Theater and other locations through Jul 22. See It's Here, It's Queer, and also freshfruitfestival.com.

Fancy that | Theater, Gay & Lesbian | reviews, guides, things to do, film - Time Out New York:

'via Blog this'

Wizzer Pizzer Review

Scott Turner Schofield and Topher Payne
in Amy Wheeler's "Wizzer Pizzer"
ARTS | THEATER 05.12.05

 
Under The Rainbow
Wizzer Pizzer a tone-switcher

BY CURT HOLMAN

Playwright Amy Wheeler comes out in the program notes of her comedy Wizzer Pizzer. The Seattle-based playwright fesses up to being "a queer Christian ... who believes in the teachings of the socio-political-activist formerly known as Jesus."

Comfortable with her spiritual beliefs, Wheeler admits to being leery of born-again evangelicals and others "in the flock." Such ambivalence gives the playwright the ideal vantage to scrutinize the "ex-gay movement" of Christian groups to cure homosexuality.

In its world-premiere production at 7 Stages, Wizzer Pizzer revels in the comic possibilities of its timely subject, turns gender politics topsy-turvy and offers something sexy for every orientation.

Yet Wheeler packs so many jokes, themes and characters into Wizzer Pizzer, the play resembles an overstuffed closet that opens and emits a noisy, colorful avalanche.

Disaffected drag queen Kevin (Topher Payne) suffers an identity crisis after his disastrous attempt to perform "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at a gay club. Adding insult to injury, his best friend, Kandi (Scott Turner Schofield), brings down the house with her drag-king rendition of Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" that same night.

Wallowing in booze and self-pity, Kevin complains that he's a walking gay stereotype, with a predictably fabulous sense of style but no feeling of passion or belonging. He happens to catch a late-night broadcast of "Dr. Nora" (Susan V. Booth), a Dr. Laura-esque tough-love therapist and founder of the "Getting Over the Rainbow" Reparative Therapy Clinic. Soon, Kevin finds himself inexplicably outside the clinic's gate, where Dr. Nora's minions attempt to straighten him out.

Wizzer Pizzer's sharpest segments depict the prayer sessions and therapeutic exercises meant to help misguided gays get in touch with their inner breeder. All-American couple Steve (Charlie Burnett) and Helen (Alison Hastings) run the clinic as former homosexuals-turned-wholesome spouses. Helen instructs the butch gals to put on makeup while Steve teaches the effete guys to suppress their desires during wrestling holds.

Steve and Helen's nuclear family is on the verge of a meltdown. They both teeter at the brink of gay "relapse," while their children, tomboy Blaine (Mary Claire Dunn) and "sissy" Gable (Brian Crawford), serve as living proof that homosexuality comes from nature, not nurture. Meanwhile, Kevin grows even more confused when Kandi shows up at the clinic - only she claims to be a man named Jack. The implications for Kevin and Kandi's relationship, let alone for cross-dressing role-play, become impossible to sort out.

Melissa Foulger directs Wizzer Pizzer's young actors to their strengths. An Atlanta playwright, Payne captures Kevin's esteem issues to find humor and occasional pathos, whether badly lip-synching to Judy Garland or attempting to impersonate a typically macho straight guy.

Schofield, duded up in cowboy gear and Western suits, gives Kandi a sly swagger reminiscent of Madonna's quote following a k.d. lang concert: "Elvis is alive." Schofield also grounds the role in a sensitivity that goes beyond preening caricature. (It's tricky picking the right pronoun for Schofield: The transgendered actor was until recently Atlanta-based actress and performance artist Kt Kilborn.)

A delicious inside joke lies in the casting of Dr. Nora. Alliance Theatre artistic director Susan Booth plays a scolding Voice of Authority in video projection and voice-over but never appears in the flesh. Like a Bible-thumping Martha Stewart, Booth gives Dr. Nora an amusing tone of testy self-righteousness. In one video interlude, Dr. Nora reveals a kinky side by pouring misplaced sexuality into a cooking demonstration: "The secret to a good meringue is in the whipping!"

Despite such comedic inspiration, Wizzer Pizzer's world premiere production feels like the kind of draft in which the playwright tosses all possible ideas onto the stage to see which one sticks. The action and tone keep switching, from ambisexual bedroom farce to surreal journey of self-discovery to after-school special about childhood gay identity. Blurring the line between dream and reality, the play gives its characters perplexing alter egos: Burnett also struts as a glammed-up club emcee, while Hastings sizzles as a bisexual femme fatale.

The play's second half proves increasingly vague and repetitious. The persistent Wizard of Oz references muddy the play's meanings. Near the end, characters contemplate murder while Jesus appears doing bad stand-up: "Take my life - please!" Like the disconnected images from somebody else's weird dream, Wizzer Pizzer all but spins to pieces.

Wizzer Pizzer forcefully punctures religious hypocrisy and the misuse of Jesus' teachings. The play speaks directly to the national brouhaha over gay marriage, but yet may not contain a spiritual message deeper than the hardly controversial "believe in yourself." Wizzer Pizzer could be circling an idea that "choice" neither applies to religious faith nor romantic feelings: You can't force physical attraction any more than you can spiritual devotion. Somewhere along the way, though, Wizzer Pizzer gets lost on the Yellow Brick Road.

Writing Sample: Short Story

A lesbian breakup on the side of a mountain with hilarious, disastrous consequences.

Falling as Sport