I’ve long been ambivalent about Canada’s largest city.

Moving to Hogtown (as it’s colloquially known) to pursue a film career during Montreal’s secessionist-besotted 1990s at first felt like salvation… but it didn’t take long for my adopted homeland’s flaws to come to the fore: like my previous stop on this trip, Boston, Toronto’s not known as a particularly warm or inviting city.

Its physical face is equally inscrutable: with a weak architectural heritage (unlike its palatial Great Lakes cousin, Chicago), Toronto’s often accused by rival Montrealers (and others) of being a bland urban space, endless glass-box high-rises making up the bulk of its cityscape.

My recent trips there have only affirmed the stereotypes: although I have a warm circle of friends who call the city home, my forays to nightspots have met with mixed success: folks were distant, regarding my adopted-Yankee friendliness and approachability with disdain. More than once, while attempting to strike up a conversation with a fetching guy or two, I had the prospect simply walk off mid-convo.

Suffice it to say, I was a bit nervous about holding a book event in this town.

At least I did my homework: the event was respectably promoted, with listings in all the major newsweeklies and a terrific radio interview care of the folks at CIRR 103.9 PROUD-FM. But I’d been in this boat before and been let down, I mused, as I walked into Glad Day Bookshop, one of the world’s oldest LGBT bookstores. The store, too, has had its share of trials of late, struggling, as many indie bookshops have, to stay afloat in the ever-changing literary marketplace. But I was determined to hold my event there for a number of reasons: in addition to Holistic Ideas Press’s support for indie bookstores, many years ago, a younger and more closeted me nervously wandered in to Glad Day to buy my very first gay-themed book.

Maybe it was karma from coming full circle, but early signs were hopeful: at the scheduled time (punctuality for a book event? really?) people began filing in, asking “is there an event here tonight?” In addition to friends and relations (and wonderfully supportive workmates — my day job has an office out in T.O.) I soon learned the reason for the large number of younger folk in attendance — as with many literary events, my readings have tended to attract something of an older crowd: a group from George Brown College had decided to make the book and the event a case study for a sexual diversity class. Say what you want about Toronto the Good (as it’s been known from its boring Protestant past), it’s a town where people show up — and on time to boot. We filled up the store and nearly sold out every copy of Wander the Rainbow in stock, our most successful event since the launch in June. Thanks everybody!

After the requisite drinks post-reading, I wandered the city’s main “gay drag,” Church Street, with an old friend — one with whom I made my first equally nervous semi-closeted forays to gay bars all those years ago. Gazing at the shimmering skyscrapers and the CN Tower in the distance, I regained that feeling for the city I’d once had and lost: Toronto’s not a place that inspires passion or excitement. But it does the so-called “hard things” well: orderly public transit, schools & hospitals, a gay community that’s good about supporting its creative crowd big and not-so-big. Like the city itself, the audience at my reading was quieter and more subdued than those in ebullient America. But they came, they saw, they listened, and they bought. For a second time in a lifetime, this oft-inscrutable place buoyed this itinerant homo in his artistic pursuits, and for that — at least from where I’m standing — this city gets a grade from me that’s far better than Good.

The first stop on my autumn mini-book tour is where the book began: Boston, Massachusetts.

Well, not quite my first stop; on the evening of my flight I’d found out Armistead Maupin (of Tales of the City fame) was speaking about his new book, another installment in his Tales universe set in the present day, Mary Ann in Autumn. The event was at A Different Light Bookstore, the same spot where I’d had my launch event several months ago.

I had good turnout for my event, but it was dwarfed by what Maupin got — the place was packed to the rafters. Then again, he’s been writing books for almost as long as I’ve been alive, so chalk one up to the power of gradual fan-building; he discussed his early days of having to churn out 800 words on a regular basis for the San Francisco Chronicle back in the day, and the endless process of negotiation of what he could and could not include in the newspaper serial that would one day become these bestselling books. I even managed to meet the man himself, had him autograph a copy of his book, and gave him an autographed copy of my book. A bit weary from the deluge of fans, when he learned I was flying out that night to do a couple of events he nodded and said “good.” The man’s a pro; he knows the drill.

One MUNI Metro, BART train, red-eye Virgin America flight, and cab ride later, and I found myself at my friends’ Sean and Kyle’s front door in the really cute Savin Hill neighborhood of Dorchester, in Boston. I had to hurry my ass over there as I had a scheduled radio interview with CIRR, 103.9 PROUD-FM, Toronto GLBT radio station. In true book tour fashion, here I was, bleary-eyed in advance of an event that night while talking up my next event with hosts Richard & Chris in Toronto. Believe me, it’s not as glamorous as it sounds! Check out the podcast of the interview here.

Some serial napping with my pals’ uber-friendly cat, and I was ready to head out for my event. I was, understandably, a bit trepidatious after my not-so-fantastic turnout at my event in Berkeley a couple of weeks back. Would this be a reprise of that fiasco?

I arrived at Trident Booksellers & Cafe to find the place almost as packed as A Different Light was the night before. No, alas, the crowd wasn’t, for the most part, there explicitly to see me… though a number of folks loped in as the evening wore on, having seen the piece in the Boston Globe that ran earlier that day. But it didn’t matter so much, given the overall bustle of the joint; although starting out felt a bit like a comedian at an open-mic night, by the end of my reading a number of otherwise-preoccupied folks were listening with interest, and a number of fence-sitters were convinced enough to buy the book. Mission accomplished!

Best of all was the venue itself and its friendly, warm, and wonderful staff: Trident has really taken the bookstore/cafe hybrid model to its logical apex, with a full-service bar & cafe that fills up evening after evening. This is the secret for emerging indie authors like myself who are only starting to build a following: partner up or ally with retailers and groups where you can build synergy. In the case of Trident, they really ran with the event and had their chef prepare selections that matched chapters in the book… you can guess what I had for dessert last night.

The best part, however, came afterward, as I segued from speaker to guest and caught up with my Boston posse late into the evening. As with my world trip itself, these book events offer the opportunity for a global nomad like myself, with commensurately far-flung friend circle, to reconnect with the latticework of compadres scattered far and wide.

Riding back to the airport, where I now sit, brought back a flood of memories and associations; the Silver Line bus was a route I took weekly back in the days before my world trip, and I was again transported to those hurly-burly days of consulting-driven travel, liver donations, and all the other forces that led me to where I am today. Funny how a gunmetal-gray piece of mass transit can hold so many associations.

To all of you who came to see me, my hearfelt thanks; for those in the Boston area and interested in buying the book, copies are still available at Trident now and into the holiday season.

Next up: Toronto!

It’s been a weekend filled with launches, dreams, and hopes.

Yesterday I was excited to attend my friend Jamil Moledina’s book launch. His new book — like mine, his first — Tearing the Sky is a magnificently compelling work of “hard science-fiction” — an oft-overlooked sub-genre of speculative fiction that deals with “real” science and humanity’s prospects for harnessing it in the far future. The really far future, in his case: the book is set 360,000 years hence, yet still features a college-age protagonist dealing with dating and female angst. It’s Isaac Asimov by way of Boy Meets World.

His event was a boffo success, with a full house at Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s sci-fi bookstore. They gave a big plug to indie publishing (Jamil did it this way as well, with some help from yours truly, after encountering endless frustration at the hands of a small-time L.A. publishing house); it’s good to see indie bookstores embracing their indie author kin — something I wrote about some months back.

This morning I had brunch with my friend Steven at Home, one of the Castro’s many breakfast joints teeming on a Sunday noon (what is it with gay guys and brunch, anyway?) Steven was at one time probably the perfect example of the changing tide of the city; far from a place where unconventional folks went to “just be,” San Francisco’s turned into another major (expensive) world center like London or New York — places described by the protagonist in Eat Pray Love in one word: “ambition.” When I met Steven in 2007 he seemed hell-bent on becoming a software mogul a la Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, with all the competitiveness and careerism that entailed.

But then, like me, something changed. After a flame-out of a relationship of his own, he too tried something different: he went to Buenos Aires for a month and had the time of his life. But that only left him craving more: he’s now seriously contemplating going away for longer, maybe doing some sort of Four Hour Work-Week type of arrangement, blending work and travel for an extended period on the road. Toward the end of our meal, he delivered a surprising line: he thanked me for being an inspiration.

I couldn’t believe it. Really, me? Further evidence, I suppose, that one’s life adventures have the capacity to incite others — even if that wasn’t the goal.

Feeling suitably inspired, and with some book-tour travels of my own about to start (and with the weather unseasonably glorious in normally chilly San Francisco), I hopped on my little scooter and did something everyone living in a major tourist destination should do once in a while: see their hometown anew.

Rolling up Nob Hill, then northward toward “crookedest” Lombard Street, I headed west into the Presidio, finally reaching Fort Point. America’s only all-brick fortification on the Pacific, it sits perched at the southern edge of the narrow inlet known as the Golden Gate. Above it climbs a spider web of orange girders that make up the start of the Golden Gate Bridge — yes, bridge builders of the 1930s had a unique challenge not only in siting a span over a windy, foggy waterway, but also gently threading it over a historic Civil War-era structure. The result, as with so many places in San Francisco, is sublime.

Sitting on the western bastion of the fort watching the sun sink into the Pacific, I found myself joined by a small-scale modeling photo shoot. A reminder that this is still San Francisco, as the skinny, leggy model was wearing an outlandish outfit, with crazy-colored hair pulled up in an impossible knot. No doubt this is another lynchpin in the aspirations of the young photographers and the model herself. And another reminder that this metropolis perched at the end of the Western Hemisphere remains a land of fancy, of dreams… a jumping-off point for endeavors, and travels, great and small.

That’s an apt description of my last week.

It began auspiciously enough, with the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series, making me a four-time inhabitant of a city where the home team won such an honor on my watch (for the curious, Toronto in 1993, Boston in 2004, Chicago White Sox in 2005, and now here in San Francisco in 2010).

The euphoria was short-lived for me, as I found myself battling a touch of the flu as Election Day came looming the next morning. Nevertheless, I hauled myself over to my neighborhood polling place and voted for the second time ever in a U.S. election and the first time in person — during the last election two years ago I faxed my vote in from an Internet cafe in Vienna, and watched the returns roll in from a sports bar in Prague.

Nothing so exciting for me this time around, as the flu kept me home and put the kibosh on a planned party I was going to host. Instead, I rested up in preparation for my big event — the last Wander the Rainbow appearance of the year at Pegasus Books in Berkeley.

The best laid plans…

I’d promoted the event extensively, with postcards and posters in and around the Castro and downtown Berkeley. I’d reached out to LGBT campus groups, all of whom seemed most interested and receptive. I posted it on event calendars and contacted local media. For this event, I even opted to try something a bit different: offering prize giveaways — a Wander the Rainbow T-shirt, a matching mug, and a premium membership by my sometime sponsor and partner in crime, gay.com. On my Facebook invite a bunch of people who’d never heard me before RSVP’d in the affirmative. It all looked promising.

Arriving a bit early, as I typically do, I found the store pretty much deserted; a smattering of patrons browsing and row upon row of empty seats in their mezzanine where they hold events. OK, no surprise there. A few friends and acquaintances showed up as event time rolled around, but aside from them and one or two others… well, we gave it a bit more time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen…

Where is everybody?

It’s the fear that haunts every author or event planner: what if you host an event and nobody shows up? Although the friends who came out still managed to make the event lively and fun — and the prize giveaways were a definite hit — this was nevertheless a decidedly humbling evening after several successful or (in the case of the launch) jam-packed events with sell-out sales for Wander the Rainbow. Alas, it looks like I’m not alone: mystery author Parnell Hall had the presence of mind (and sense of humor) to cook up this hilarious YouTube ditty about his similar experience in book-event-land.

Happily, the week ended on an up note: a couple of e-mails and Facebook messages from readers who’ve been greatly enjoying the book did a lot to lift my spirits and make me feel this whole publishing adventure hasn’t been a fool’s errand. Then, to cap it all off, I jaunted down to L.A. for a quick overnight to catch my brother-in-law — indie producer, actor and writer Joseph McKelheer — hosting a launch of his own, the premier of Hamill at the prestigious AFIFest.

Joe and his team have been working on Hamill for five years (longer than the timespan of my liver donation, round-the-world trip, book writing and release for WTR combined), and the results have paid off: it’s a beautiful, uplifting story of Matt Hamill, the first-ever deaf UFC fighter and three-time NCAA champ. More than just a Rocky for deaf people, the movie manages emotion without undue sentimentality, a broad biopic sweep without epic length.

Perhaps ending the week this way serves as reminder to those of us flogging our creative wares: it’s a slow process, beset with triumphs and setbacks. But we do it, ultimately, to communicate, to share those stories we find meaningful (ours and others) with the world… and have them elicit the same feelings of hope, struggle, and human drama in others that they had for us.

If you’ve been following this blog much, you’ve probably noticed it covers a range of subjects, from gay marriage to the odd movie of note and/or interest, to travel experiences (mine and others)… plus, of course, updates and information about the release of Wander the Rainbow, the travel memoir that this site is supposed to be really about.

At dinner the other night, though, a fan of the book noticed something was missing: why isn’t there, she mused, anything on your personal experiences? As many of you know, I chose to publish this book independently — a synonym for “self-publishing,” a term many people, including me, keep on the QT for fear of being branded “vanity press”. Also as a consequence of that, I’ve kept mum on details of “how it’s going”; the publishing business is normally quite secretive on book sales figures, mostly because very few books sell all that well (it’s rare for any title, self-published or otherwise, to sell more than 5,000 copies). Between that and the whole “always present a good face” mindset that infects so much of sales and publicity, I’ve allowed the publishing and promotional details to take on a blandly cheery feel.

No more.

From here on out, you’ll be getting it all — the good, the bad, and the ugly. This may surprise some, delight other, and (possibly) piss off a few… but I feel you’re all better served by learning the realities, the triumphs, and the heartbreak of this publishing odyssey. I’ve got plenty of all those stories and emotions to share, and it’s all coming soon.

Say the words San Jose and vision of tech firms or (if you go way back) apricot orchards spring to mind; but this sprawling Silicon Valley nexus — a bigger city than San Francisco, in fact — boasts its own thriving literary and LGBT scene… and both of these converged this past Wednesday night at Crema Coffee to hear me speak.

Heading down there was something of an emotionally-resonant first: I hadn’t set foot on a commuter-rail Caltrain in over 14 months, when I was working at a gig in Menlo Park immediately after my return from the great world trip. Back then I would use the commute time productively — I sat with my little netbook, the same one I’d used on my travels, and began putting together the morass of blogs and journal entries into the beginnings of what would become Wander the Rainbow. Now here I was headed, books in hand, to speak about it — full circle indeed!

Since this was a 20somethings biweekly coffee klatch that met under the auspices of the Billy DeFrank LGBT Community Center, it was arguably the youngest set of people to whom I’d spoken; were the vagaries of fancy-ass flashpacking and liver donations to long-term boyfriends going to resonate with this crowd? The answer was an unqualified “yes.” Like many gays (myself included) these folks expressed a familiar reluctance to travel the world “roughing it” style — and were most curious to know about the “third way” I’d discovered between the low-rent and the five star. They were equally fascinated with the dynamics of a relationship that involved an organ donation — and the wrenching aftermath of a breakup that led to me striking out across the globe.

I also tried out a couple of new things those of you coming to future engagements will notice: I still read three excerpts from the book — but for the third excerpt, I give audience members a choice of options. To find out what they are… come to one of our upcoming events!

I also wore one of the new Wander the Rainbow T-shirts, one of which we’ll be giving away as part of our “trivia contest giveaway” at bookstore events next month. For those of you planning to attend an event, here’s the questionnaire to fill out and bring with you for a chance to win this and other prizes.

All in all, a great evening — thanks to Josh Weston, Joe Calderon, and all the folks at Crema Coffee and the Billy DeFrank Center for making it happen. Next stops: Berkeley, Boston, Toronto, and beyond!

What The Social Network has to teach us about friendship, business, and the American Dream

If there’s one thing a long trip helps to sharpen and clarify, it’s one’s notions (and occasional frustrations) about life back home. Although not everyone utterly rejects and abandons their homeland, time away definitely induces one to notice the warts & all you leave behind.

This was on my mind as I watched The Social Network, the Aaron Sorkin-penned (The West Wing), David Fincher-directed (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) story of the founding of Facebook. For the uninitiated, the monstrously successful social network (500 million-plus users and an estimated valuation of over $11 billion) had messy origins, replete with student-life melodrama and big-money lawsuits as it climbed to the top of not only the social-networking heap (remember MySpace? Friendster?) but to the pinnacle of the web overall — it’s the number-two ranked site on the entire Internet, and its co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is the youngest billionaire in history.

I didn’t go to Harvard and I’m not a billionaire web entrepreneur, but so much of this film spoke to me: the social awkwardness of being a geek in college; the rush of excitement and raw emotion that accompanies youthful business endeavors; the fallout and reprisals between friends and lovers. Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) comes across as icy and arrogant — but he’s so unbelievably similar to many hyper-smart outsider tech geeks that I don’t consider the portrait all that unflattering. In my own past I’ve had run-ins with collegate political correctness and the intransigence of university officials. On those levels, I get you, Zuck (as the real-life Facebook founder is known).

But what echoed most deeply about the story is the ever-present competitiveness and money/power-grabbing that underlies the Facebook enterprise and the power centers where it is situated: America’s elite academic center (Boston/Harvard), its media center (New York, sidelined in the story as Facebook finds only modest success in securing early-stage advertisers) and its technology center (the San Francisco Bay Area). I’ve remarked for years how the Bay Area in general and San Francisco in particular have morphed from once-sleepy hippie spots to the center of America’s most prestigious and visible industry. This movie nails it, as Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), the partying, manic, glitzy Napster co-founder, seduces Zuck to the capitalist dark side with promises of venture funding and ultimate billions (both of which have since come true) at a San Francisco nightclub.

Like the fictional Charles Foster Kane before him, Zuckerberg makes the ultimate business choice: he sidelines his more cautious best friend Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) and his incremental business plans in favor of the growth-and-glory-obsessed Parker — just as Kane did to his best friend Jedediah Leland in Orson Welles’ movie. Earlier on, Zuckerberg blows off old-money Harvard twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and their plans for a social network of their own. Just like Kane and Rosebud (his sled, which represented the simple, modest life he left behind), Zuck leaves all these guys and their moderately-winning schemes in the dust in pursuit of epic, huge-time success.

But just as Kane posited, so too this movie: what serious go-getter in our present-day capitalist age– an era where the U.S.A. acts as standard-bearer — wouldn’t make these choices? In my early days in this country I called it the American Nightmare — the dark side of the American Dream that compels anyone with an opportunity to take it and run with it to its greatest, most successful end, sometimes at the expense of your nearest and dearest.

Ironically, as both films show, those titans of industry who’ve been so instrumental in making our lives easier, more comfortable, or more connected suffer from an inability to truly connect with others: Kane tries to collect artifacts but cannot win the hearts of an electorate or the heart of his two wives; Zuck, at the end of the film, finds the girl who dumped him at the start of the story — on Facebook, natch — where he sends her a friend request and sits there, refreshing the page over and over, waiting for a response. The young man who connected so many millions remains, at heart, a loner.

This past weekend was literally Wander the Rainbow‘s day in the sun, as we hit two different book fairs in the blazing California heat.

On Saturday it was the Sonoma County Book Festival, held in Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square. Although I’d been to Sonoma a couple of times (and even wrote about it in this GayCities piece) I’d never been to its largest town.

Most of us associate Sonoma with wine — or for the LGBT community, the Russian River. But Santa Rosa has its own vibe and even its own favorite son: Charles Schultz, the Peanuts comic creator, lived here, and his whimsical influence is felt everywhere: from an ice-skating rink he opened to statues of the iconic characters dotting the square to an appearance by a real-life Snoopy… given that it was 94 degrees in the afternoon, I can only hope this one had air conditioning for its hapless occupant.

Wander the Rainbow had a good run up in Sonoma, attracting attention and selling a pile of copies. But a travel book needs to stay true to its roots, and to that end we hopped on a Southwest Airlines flight — an echo of my first one on the round-the-world trip as it also left from Oakland during a heatwave — down to Southern California for Book Fair Number Two.

Sunday saw me at the West Hollywood Book Fair, held in the park behind The Abbey (a coffeehouse-turned-nightclub that was a haunt for my gang during our L.A. days a decade-plus ago). I roamed the crowd, made new friends, and even caught Christopher Rice (son of Anne Rice and himself a bestselling mystery novelist) in conversation with Matthew Link, co-creator of Columbo.

Monday was supposed to be a full day of postcarding (much like our Postcard Pub Crawl back in June) and scouting out venues for a future event… but at 113 degrees, it was the hottest day ever recorded in downtown Los Angeles and around, leaving me panting, breathless and mostly incapable of doing much of anything. Still, I managed to speak with a couple of venues… for you fans of the book in SoCal, sit tight… an event is coming your way soon!

As night fell it cooled off (though only a bit) and I experienced a California first: in all my years of living here I’d never ridden in a convertible. A friend of my brother-in-law indulged us with a ride in his vintage “land yacht” — I can’t believe they made cars this big back in the day. As we rode through Los Feliz, downtown L.A.’s shimmering skyscrapers were lit up behind a stand of darkened palm trees — an everyday scene for the SoCal crew but for me another magical reminder of why this part of the world bewitches me so — and keeps me coming back.

Here’s what arrived in the mail just the other day from the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C.: