GLR May-June 2026

show business after college. And for some reason, or maybe for no reason at all— again, it was an awfully long time ago—the book about a twentysomething nightclub singer falling in love with a bisexual banker was born. Eight Days a Week was published in 1985 and did rather well in its niche market. In those days, there were “Gay Best Seller” lists compiled by the network of gay book stores that, alas, no longer exists, and I re call Eight Days a Week appearing on such lists for months. But Alyson Publications was only a steppingstone to St. Martin’s— I’d told Sasha Alyson as much before sign ing our contract. By the time Eight Days a Week was published, I was mailing Black bird Singin’ in the Dead of Night (as the novel was then called) to St. Martin’s, ad dressed to Michael Denneny, whom I as sumed would remember me and Eight Days aWeek —which he later informed me he hadn’t (“I read an awful lot of books,” he explained). I’d written Blackbird with Denneny very much in mind, and I’d read several books he had recently published to get a working idea of what he might want in a gay novel about high school. Luckily, St. Martin’s had published Boys on the Rock , JohnFox’ coming-of-age, coming-out novel, in 1984. As I read the book, I noted that one of the

supporting characters dies and assumed this death constituted Denneny’s idea of “some thing happening.” So I killed off two sup porting characters in Blackbird , doingFox one better. Whether accidental teenage deaths are what convinced Denneny that Blackbird was worth publishing, I shall never know. I had mistakenly assumed that being with a major New York publisher meant that a publicity army would be at my disposal, placing full-page ads and booking me on talk shows. But St. Martin’s did little more than send the book out for review and wait. And aside from trade publications ( Publish ersWeekly gave Blackbird a starred review, while Kirkus called it “rather simple minded”), the non-gay world ignored my book completely. The gay reviews were uni formly positive—writer-movie historian Vito Russo blurbed the book (“ Blackbird soars!”). Black gay writer-publisher Joseph Beam enthused in The Advocate : “We have all been waiting for this novel to arrive.” But the book didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. I had been advanced $4,000 by St. Martin’s and I don’t think I saw another dime until 2006, when Arsenal Pulp Press of Vancouver published the twentieth-an niversary edition. I got letters—mostly positive—from Black gay men who, as Beam said, had ap

parently been waiting for my novel. And some less positive, also from Black gay men, wishing I had written something else, say, a Black-on-Black love story, or a story set in the ghetto. My response to such wishes was usually some variation of: “You’re right—that book should be written. You write that book.” Blackbird is nowcon sidered “the first modern Black coming-out novel.” But in minority art, a disadvantage of being “the first” is that everybody wants you to have written their story. And over the following years, Randall Kenan, Steven Corbin, E. Lynn Harris, James Earl Hardy, and others came along and wrote their ver sions of “that book.” It’s arguable that I “opened the door” for those writers (indeed, I recall a snippy review of Kenan’s AVisita tion of Spirits that called it “just another Black gay novel of the Larry Duplechan va riety”). But I just wanted to tell my stories. Still, as recently as this year, four decades on, I am still contacted on social media by men a generation or more my junior, thank ingme for Blackbird , telling me that reading it helped them come out. And I must say, there are worse things about getting older. Larry Duplechan is the author of five gay novels, including Got ‘til It’s Gone (2008) and a film memoir, Movies That Made Me Gay (2023).

May–June 2026

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