[dropcap]E[/dropcap]dmund White, one of the literary giants of the gay world, once called the gay literary arts journal “BLOOM,” “The most exciting new queer literary publication to emerge in years.”
Pick up one of the slim volumes, flip through the pages and you’ll find visceral poetry, along with expertly crafted, immersive prose.
“BLOOM,” a publication that celebrates the art and poetry of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered artists and writers, is the creation of Charles Flowers.
“What I wanted to do was create a gay and lesbian space where gay and lesbian writers could write about whatever they wanted to write about,” Flowers said.
On Wednesday, Flowers is set to launch the latest edition of his publication at Blu Dot at 8000 Melrose Ave. at Doheny, running from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The publication has been in print since 2004, and took a three-year hiatus before re-launching in 2011.
Among the featured authors is Eloise Klein Healy, recently named LA’s “poet laureate” in a ceremony at the Central Library in downtown LA, and a figure in the LA poetry since the 1970s.
Flowers is a native of Tennessee who grew up enthralled with the written word, first reading science fiction before graduating to the likes of American poet Sylvia Plath.
“My mom thought it was hilarious,” said Flowers. “In elementary school, English was my worst subject.”
But in junior high, something changed. By college, he was double majoring in English and math while attending Vanderbilt.
Flowers currently works in development for Arts for LA, a watchdog organization that keeps an eye on Los Angeles’ cultural budget. However, his background is in book publishing.
“I moved to New York to pursue book publishing, and I got a lucky break at Doubleday,” he said. “I like publishing, I learned so much. I didn’t like the business of publishing so much. That’s why I left. I call it the ‘acquisition circus’ of meeting with lit agents. First of all, you are with a group of editors and you are all vying for the same books.”
Flowers wasn’t satisfied.
“It became all about money, and I was interested in books, and writing and editing. I guess I was an old-fashioned editor.”
Flowers carries himself with the patience and calm of a natural-born editor, or a gardener, someone with years’ worth of experience at gently trimming away at dead leaves to reveal the beauty underneath. But his frustration with the publishing world finally got the best of him.
“I had a horrible acquisition record. My books were good, but I didn’t have enough of them, I guess.”
One of those books belonged to E. Lynn Harris, a black gay writer who became a phenomenon in the 1990s.
“I was at Doubleday when they acquired him, that was a lot of fun,” Flowers said. “I edited five or six books of his. And when I left Doubleday they hired me to freelance edit for him. So I got to do what I liked to do. I freelanced for about three years and I started working for a poetry organization, the Academy of American Poets. That was really cool.”
It was at the Academy of American Poets where Charles Flowers got the idea to start BLOOM. He took a cue from other AAP staff members who were editing literary journals from home.
Joan Larkin, an American poet who was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing movement of the 1970s, also Flower’s friend, agreed to be his poetry editor. With her connections, Flowers quickly assembled a group of editors, including Adrienne Rich, widely considered one of the most influential poets of the second half of the 20th century, and Andrew Holleran, the pseudonym of prominent novelist, essayist and short story writer Eric Garber.
“And this was 2003? 2004? There just weren’t a lot of places of quality for gay and lesbian writers to publish in without naked men on the cover,” Flower said. “But it’s evolved. Now about a third of the writers and poets are recognized and for the rest this is maybe their first time to get published.”
Writers must be gay to be included, but the subject matter can cover anything.
“You see it most in the poetry, which is all over the place,” Flowers said. “The prose tends to have a gay protagonist or secondary character. And people seem to like that idea. They responded really well. And I had a great designer, and it looked really beautiful. And when it first came out people were like ‘Oh my god, it’s literary and it’s not commercial and it’s serious, but it has a sense of humor.’”
And there are no naked people on the covers.
“Early on, I had distribution in book stores,” Flowers said. “And the distributor who took it on, the guy who did the buying and the selling of the gay books, said he didn’t think it was going to do well because there was no flesh on the cover. So I kind of went around him to the lesbian that was higher than him, and she basically told him he had to distribute it.”
Within two years, Flowers was selling 400 copies per issue. Over three years, he published five issues.
However, “I ended up having a three-year hiatus, which I didn’t know was going to be a three-year hiatus,” Flowers said.
It started in 2008 when Flowers took a new job with the Lambda Literary Foundation, and moved to California.
“It was all-encompassing, I was the only employee,” Flowers said. “It was all-consuming. And then we moved out here, and I just didn’t have the energy.”
So Flowers took a “little” break.
“I kept thinking ‘next month I’ll get back into it.’ And then three years passed,” he said.
BLOOM has been back in print since 2011.
“Now we are on BLOOM 2.0, and that’s been volumes 6, 7 and 8, which have come out of Los Angeles.”
Flowers admits he’s made some mistakes getting here.
“I didn’t communicate with people during the hiatus, and I pissed people off. People were sending us work and I wasn’t responding. People sent us money for subscriptions and they didn’t get all of their issues because we weren’t publishing. And when we came back I wasn’t sure people were still going to be interested. But they were.”
Flowers found people still cared, and were willing to make donations. Without having the money to print BLOOM in December, despite having the issue ready, he turned to — of all places — Facebook. He raised $1,200 to print BLOOM.
“(There were) a lot of $20, $40 donations, one person donated $250,” he said. “Someone who I had formerly published who is an academic and has no money sent $10. So many people were willing to trust that I would deliver something.”
Flowers is emphatic that there must be a print publication, though he is no Luddite.
“I’m a big believer in print as a platform, and I think there is still an audience for print books. Though I am now researching e-books, while keeping the new issues as print and releasing the back issues as e-books. I don’t want to ignore the technology. I love technology! But I am of a generation where the first image you found as a gay person was in books. There were no gay people on TV. There weren’t really any gay people in movies. There are whole generations of gay and lesbian communities that found themselves in books.”
Books also still serve a younger generation of lesbians and gays, he insists.
“Some librarian in some small town is saving a child because they are giving them books that show them that being gay is okay.”
Because of Flowers, there is a chance that book might be BLOOM.
