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Michael Denneny
(1943 - living) U.S.A.

Michael Denneny

Book editor

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Michael Denneny of St. Martin's Press, who was one of the first editors to publish openly gay and lesbian material in the early 1970s, bought the highly literary, experimental novel and enthusiastically likened it to Angels in America. He planned to market it as a "gay novel," but he discovered that his straight colleagues "wondered why I thought of Angels in America as a "gay play" - they just saw it as an award-winning play about AIDS. So we decided to market KoolAIDS as a "literary" novel." Although the few reviews it received were positive, its sales were disappointing.

In a move that shocked industry insiders, editor Michael Denneny on March 1 abruptly left St. Martin's Press, where he had worked (with a brief intermission at Crown Books) since the mid 1970s. Denneny (along with the late editor Bill Whitehead at Dutton) played the leading role in introducing mainstream publishing to gay and lesbian books. Among the many authors that Denneny edited were Randy Shilts, Ethan Mordden, Christopher Davis, John Fox, Allen Barnett, Paul Monette, Nisa Donnelly, Rabih Alameddine, and Ernesto Maestre.

He also edited: The Christopher Street Reader, First Love/Last Love: New Fiction from Christopher Street, The Perv: Stories, Decent Passions: Real Stories about Love, Lovers: Story of Two Men, The view from Christopher street.

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