Cross-posted; apologies for any duplication.

Greetings:

Readers may be interested in the following biography of gay Hollywood
gossip columnist Mike Connolly, which will be published next year.  I
think the author wrote a very interesting gay studies biography of James
Dean several years ago:

AU: Holley, Val.
TI: Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip.
PB: Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, 2003.
DE: 168 p., photographs, notes, bibliography, index.
ISBN: 0-7864-1552-5.
PRICE: $32.00.
CATALOGUE DESCRIPTION (from:
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/action.lasso?-db=Promodat.fp3&-lay=Viewing%20Layout&-format=record%5fdetail.htm&-recid=33224&-find):
'In 1954, Mike Connolly, the gay gossip columnist for the Hollywood
Reporter from 1951 to 1966, was described by Newsweek as "probably the
most influential columnist inside the movie colony," the one writer "who
gets the pick of trade items, the industry rumors, the policy and casting
switches." He was indeed one of the most talented and influential members
of the Hollywood press of his time, and his column, for those who could
read between the lines, was a daily chronicle of gay goings-on. Fifty
years later, his cumulative output is a virtually untapped lode of gay
Hollywood history.
'Mike Connolly's life and work are the focus of this book. It considers
his formative years, pre-World War II life at the University of Illinois
and in Chicago, and the ways in which the homosexual community in
Hollywood lived lives both secretive and open in the forties, fifties and
sixties. It also examines the literary merit, power and newsworthiness of
Connolly's "Rambling Reporter" column in the Hollywood Reporter and its
significance as a chronicle of gay Hollywood life, the previously
unexplored role of Connolly's column in the Hollywood blacklist and how
his anti-Communist crusade was rooted in his earlier campaign to close
down the brothels in his college town, and how his life informed his
column and how his column shaped his life.'

Regards,

Charles Richards

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R. Charles Richards
1140 S. Ames St. #1
Lakewood, CO 80232
USA
Phone: 303-935-7586
E-mail: [log in to unmask]

"...I'd have to ask myself
so many other questions, ones you never
taste in the brightness of your day,

though they answer me
like the risen sea."

-- John Ashbery, "A Postcard from Pontevedra"


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