The folks at gay.com have deputized me once again — this time to go to the movies.

I’ll be at a special advance screening of Eat Pray Love, the new Julia Roberts film based on the bestselling travel memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert.

I didn’t catch the book on its initial release in 2006, and only happened upon it midway through my own world journey. Gilbert’s adventure differed greatly from mine — she did longer stays in a handful of countries, and her book is filled with the sort of spiritual discoveries that leave secularists like me shaking our heads. Nevertheless, there are commonalities — as there are between many works of travel literature where a personal story is involved.

I’m looking forward to seeing how they translated this breezy, rambling (and somewhat divisive — people either loved it or hated it) book to the big screen… and who knows, maybe someday in Wander the Rainbow’s future a movie adaptation awaits…

It seems a bit strange to be turning this book blog into “the gay marriage channel,” but it seems that’s the way current events are trending.

Barely a week after my own father married two men back in Canada, a court here in California ruled that the voter-backed ban on gay marriage in California, the notorious Proposition 8, is unconstitutional.

The play-by-play has been done to death so I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say that in spite of an election year that saw a Democratic sweep of Congress and the election of America’s first black President, this retrograde bit of referendum-style balloting still managed to win — partly thanks to a firehose of money and effort by the Mormon Church, a subject capably covered in a documentary recently released on DVD.

What always amazes me, though, is in spite of all the millions spent and ideological certainty put forth by gay marriage opponents… well, not one of them has ever come out and actually explained why gay marriage in any way “weakens” families or the traditional institution of marriage. We get the usual silly platitudes about “the Bible says so” (it really doesn’t) or “soon people will be asking to marry their dogs” (the notion that consenting adults in love is what’s at issue seems to have escaped them). But analysis? I’ve looked everywhere for it, and aside from a passing mention in some Wall Street Journal piece some years back about fluctuating divorce rates in the Netherlands, have found not a single shred of evidence, anywhere that allowing gay people to marry will in any way weaken existing marriages, harm children, or other jeremiads that issue forth from the religious right.

I move that, just like Germany has banned public expressions of Nazism from the post-World War II German state, that any bans on gay marriage be require to call themselves just that — “gay marriage bans.” No obfuscating language about focusing on families or protecting sacred institutions or other misleading nomenclature that probably helped Prop 8 win passage (and even with that, narrow passage at best). It’s time that bigotry and narrow-mindedness be forced to call itself what it is.

A few weeks back, on a summertime visit to my family in Montreal, I wrote about two of my parents’ closest friends, a couple for 25 years, planning to finally tie the knot now that gay marriage is official and legally enshrined in Canada at a federal level — one of only a handful of countries where this right exists. More surprising to me was that my father, an attorney, was to officiate at the ceremony. Most surprising of all, however, was the overall blasé-ness of all parties involved, who’d make so little hay of it I only found out about the whole affair as a passing conversational remark.

Well, last weekend they did the deed! It’s still surreal to me, living in a country where this is now hotly contested, to see a marriage certificate with the names of two men on it — no different than such certificates for straight couples:

Both parties and family members were thrilled and deeply moved… and my seven-year-old niece, upon hearing that the two men (whom she’s known all her life) had gotten married, responded with a joyous “cool!” on hearing the news. It’s good to see that the next generation is taking these changes in stride… and far’s we can all tell, the institution of marriage in Canada seems to be doing just fine.

Congratulations guys… you’re a beacon to the rest of us!

The folks at gay.com are having a giveaway!

It’s easy: answer a few fun trivia questions from events and places mentioned in the book, send in your answers to the site, and win!

As you’d expect, the questions are funny, juicy, sexy… and not too hard.

Good luck!

Click here to go to the contest page

For those of you who’ve read (or are reading) Wander the Rainbow, you’ve probably picked up on a motif running throughout the book: my continued fascination with movies, and how they partly inspired my choice of locations worldwide.

I was reminded of this last night when attending a showing of (yes, really) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the now-classic Steven Spielberg movie I’m just old enough to remember seeing for the first time in theatres.

But not a theatre like this! Oakland’s Paramount Theatre is a movie palace from Hollywood’s Golden Age, in its day the largest on the West Coast. A band of dedicated locals have kept the place alive and in top Art Deco glory — right down to uniformed ushers and pre-show newsreels and cartoons. Heading to the East Bay for this event with some friends felt like a mini-re-enactment of parts of my grand world journey.

I was equally impressed with this classic kids’ movie’s power to entrance: In attendence were scads of little ones, all a generation younger than the film. In spite of living in a CGI-saturated era, however, the audience was just as enthralled with this film as I remember them being back in the early 1980s: applause in all the right places (including those magical bicycle lift-offs devoutly yearned for by every cyclist kid with an imagination), laughter throughout… and more than a bit of nostalgia for those days of Asteroids, Dungeons & Dragons, and kids able to safely navigate Halloween trick-or-treating after dark.

For my part, I was reminded how those sci-fi films of the 1970s and early 1980s inspired my imagination and will to take flight: like Elliot, I yearned for something more than my familial existence and school-day life — though growing up in snowy Eastern Canada in a somewhat old-school community at-times hostile to Hollywood flights of fancy, the California suburbs depicted in the film seemed to me impossibly exotic.

Perhaps, then, that’s the role of imaginative films like E.T.: Not only to entertain, but to inspire the imaginative among us to look beyond their immediate surroundings and off to the horizon… where incredible places, amazing experiences, and (though it hasn’t happened to me yet) the odd extra-terrestrial may come calling.

With the book successfully launched, many of you are wondering “what’s next? “Will there be a book tour?” “What else are you planning?”

Answers: Yes — lots coming up!

We have another event scheduled here in San Francisco — a reading and signing at Books Inc. in the Castro. For those of you who missed the previous event — or who simply want more Wander the Rainbow in their lives — mark your calendars for August 12 at 7:30 p.m. More details (including a mass invite) are coming soon.

We’ll also be announcing more dates and more locations; most of these will be in the Bay Area and Southern California to start with, but we are planning some forays elsewhere.

We’re also planning a book giveaway and contest with gay.com, featuring some clever trivia questions about the book and destinations mentioned within it.

In the meantime, our reviewers have been busy! Check out the reviews page for the latest on what people have been saying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khat

A thanks to Jesse (you know who you are!) for this bit of fact-checking.

For more details… check out the book!

In addition to the book event, my Montreal sojourn was marked by another bit of rainbow-related news.

I came to Montreal with marriage on the brain: my youngest sister down in Southern California had gotten hitched recently – the last of my three siblings to tie the knot. At a barbecue hosted in one of my other sisters’ sprawling backyard, I learned this wasn’t the only marriage to be celebrated – and in this case officialized – retroactively.

My mother’s business partner, a realtor in Montreal, has been coupled for twenty-five years. Ron and Don (yes, those are their real names) had held a wedding ceremony some two decades back, long before gay marriage was even a glimmer of legislation practically anywhere. As with gay couples in America today, they drew up a lengthy, complex patchwork of documents that mostly – but still incompletely – acted as rough equivalent to what true marriage offers hetero couples by default. When gay marriage was made official in Canada in 2005, they shrugged – they’d already de facto done the deed all those years back – why bother with the paperwork now?

I guess there’s something about a milestone like a quarter-century that changes minds, because they decided they’d “get legal” this year. But who would do the deed? They reached out to one close friend authorized to perform weddings — but he was going to be out of town on the specified date. So they found an attorney, a close friend who’d never officiated at a wedding before, but with a modicum of preparation and licensure could be deputized to perform the act in compliance with the law. My jaw nearly hit the table when I learned who that was.

My father!

Leaving aside my wonderment at my parents’ openness and acceptance of gaydom, or how great it is of my Dad to be doing this for two close friends… was their attitude about the whole thing. All three parties – the gay couple and my father – were so nonplussed they’d neglected to mention it to me altogether! As I strolled through Montreal’s “gay village” with my coupled friends – the district’s main drag turns into a lively pedestrian mall during Montreal’s all-too-brief summer – they expressed amazement at my amazement: none of them realized what big news this would be if it were occurring south of their border.

It’s times like these I’m truly proud to be Canadian!

After a very successful inaugural reading and launch party in San Francisco, it was time to take Wander the Rainbow on the road – and north of the border – to my native hometown, Montreal.

Following a weekend of family events, I paid a visit to Bibliophile, a compact indie bookstore tucked into Montreal’s West End, for a reading & signing event replete with white wine, San Pellegrino, and Belgian chocolates – most fitting considering the subject matter!

In addition to my entire immediate family – all together in town for the first time in years – the event was attended by a respectable number of Montreal’s English-speaking community… including, among others, a young local librarian who seemed most curious about this city’s native-son-turned-world-traveler-turned-indie-author.

I read some selections from the book that had been well received at previous events, but mixed it up a little for World Cup season by including portions of my chapter on Cape Town, South Africa. It’s been nice to see locales I’d visited almost two years back receiving their fifteen minutes of fame on the world’s airwaves these past days and weeks, and the crowd seemed to respond well to my take on these spots at the other corner of the globe.

This reading also offered a unique challenge care of some special guests of honor: two of my five nieces and nephews – to whom the book is dedicated – showed up. This meant some skirting of the more juicy parts of the book – no tales of Berlin sex clubs here – but it also, surprisingly, led to a lively question-and-answer session: both Jackson and Lola, now aged eight and seven, respectively, asked remarkably adult questions about their uncle’s wanderings and book-writing odyssey – happily none that involved explaining things they’re a bit too young to understand. Those bits will have to wait a few more years.

All in all, another stellar success – we filled the place up and sold almost as many copies as we did in San Francisco… no mean feat on a sultry post-holiday Monday in a city with an English readership barely larger than some U.S. college towns. To all Montrealers in attendance, a hearty thanks. And to those in other cities, hang in there: after some more San Francisco appearances, the Wander the Rainbow road show will continue!

On the surface, independent bookstores would seem a natural fit for indie authors and publishers. Both operate outside the so-called “mainstream” of large retail chains, mass-market-targeted product, and exclusive agent/publisher arrangements.

And yet, barriers persist: the bookselling industry is a well oiled machine of large distributors, returnable and remaindered books, and hefty discounts designed for the massive print runs of the mainstream publishing business. Considering that most indie publishers operate on a print-on-demand model — with commensurately higher unit costs and an inability to offer returnable stock — it would appear that they are frozen out of the supply chain — a chain that even the smallest of independent bookstores relies on.

But these realities can be overcome, and once they are, the natural fit of independent players becomes apparent: print-on-demand may be more expensive per-unit than short-run offset printing (a 250-page book typically costs $3 to $4 to print on-demand, versus less than half that using a traditional printer)… but there’s also no issue with inventory, itself typically a euphemism for “piles of book boxes sitting unsold.” An independent publisher can arrange for shipments direct from printer to bookseller, and offer the bookstore the same consignment-basis, returnable-stock policy they’re accustomed to receiving from the majors. For the publisher, it’s a bit more work — on top of their grass-roots marketing efforts promoting their titles, they now take on the role of distribution middleman. But as with everything in the Internet age, this process is greatly simplified: software accounting programs such as QuickBooks allow small publishers to bill bookstores and handle returns easily. This process might not scale well to thousands of stores — but many dozens can be capably handled by even the smallest of indie publishing houses. In exchange, they receive real-life storefront exposure — essentially free advertising. Better yet, since most indie booksellers congregate around major centers or college towns, the opportunity to target an optimum clientele is unaparalleled.

Okay then… so what’s in it for the bookstore, in exchange for dealing with another book supplier and the added paperwork that implies? In addition to new and distinctive content, the real synergy comes from book events: indie authors and publishers are hungry to connect with readers. The immediate conclusion many jump to is “use the Internet” — with the implied focus on Amazon and e-book distribution that freezes out local booksellers. Yes, the online marketplace is here to stay and makes up a major sales channel for publishers of all stripes… but it’s also a vast netherworld of me-too websites, spam, and other assorted flotsam that makes it tough for small-scale book publishers to find their readership.

The book event — most commonly the reading & signing, though unconventional “themed” activities are also commonplace — is where indie publishers and indie bookstores can come together. Mainstream authors and publishers schedule book tours all the time — but for the less-well-known independents, this is a vital promotional opportunity as it enables readers to hear about new content for the first time. For booksellers, meanwhile, it brings traffic into the store that might not otherwise walk in: a successful book event can draw dozens of people, all of whom will likely purchase not only the book around which the event is centered, but also other works they may find interesting while browsing the shelves. For a large bookseller, this bump in traffic may be trivial — but for the nowadays-beleaguered indie bookseller, it represents a golden opportunity.

Just as TV didn’t displace theatrical first-run movies, it’s unlikely the online book marketplace and e-books will displace booksellers. The best way for indie booksellers to remain relevant is to provide “value-added” content — not merely by offering personalized service and hard-to-find titles, but by teaming up with publishers operating outside the mainstream who can organize events, draw in customers, and help build community.