Ex-beauty queen Jeannie Colter is a born-again politician who hates homosexuals, and wants to crush them. William Laird is her devoted father - a wealthy financier who has kept a secret all his life. He is gay. When his fervent daughter runs for Governor of New York, and he has the money to get her elected, Bill Laird is trapped between family and fanaticism. A riveting chronicle of politics, religion and gay rights in the 70's.
PATRICIA NELL WARREN
AUTHOR, PUBLISHER AND ACTIVIST
BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Nell Warren has written and published professionally since 1954, at age 18. In 54 years, her subjects have ranged from women and Goddess Earth to human rights, from gay life and mixed-blood people in American history to wildlife, the environment and current events.
Now 73 years old, she was born in 1936 and raised on a Montana ranch. She worked as a Reader's Digest book editor for 15 years, on both the magazine staff and the Condensed Book Club.
Today Warren lives in Los Angeles, where she co-owns an independent book-publishing and media company, Wildcat International, in partnership with media specialist/writer Tyler St. Mark.
Fiction
Since 1971 Warren has published eight novels -- several with mainstream publishers (Morrow, Bantam, Ballantine, Dial Press, Penguin) and several under her own independent imprint, Wildcat Press. The Front Runner, Harlan's Race and Billy's Boy are a landmark series that follows an evolving family through 20 years of gay life. Her most recent gay-themed novel is The Wild Man, a bestseller that came out in 2001.
She also published two mainstream novels, The Last Centennial (1971) and One Is the Sun (1991), as well as four books of Ukrainian poetry.
Warren's best-known fiction work, The Front Runner, was first published by William Morrow in 1974, and became the most popular gay love story of all time. The book has sold an estimated 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into ten languages, the most recent being Italian.
Film rights of The Front Runner have been in development for some years, and recently received a great deal attention as one of "Hollywood's unmade gay films" during Brokeback Mountain's run-up for the Academy Awards.
Currently Warren is working on a new novel titled Wrong Side of the Tracks.
Nonfiction
Warren's newest title is her first nonfiction book. It's titled The Lavender Locker Room, an anthology of nonfiction articles about gay pioneers in sports history, that appeared on Outsports.com. Published in 2006, it was an Amazon history topseller, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal in the gay-lesbian category, and was a finalist in the Benjamin Franklin Awards.
Warren's articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of mainstream publications, including Atlantic Monthly, Los Angeles Times, Reader's Digest, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Modern Maturity, Persimmon Hill, New York Press, Des Moines Register, Mythosphere, Corporate Africa. She has also published in various leading gay publications.
For A & U Magazine she writes a monthly column on the politics of AIDS and public health. Online, she blogs at The Bilerico Project, the most popular and politically vociferous glbt blog on the Web, as well as the Huffington Post.
She is also writing further sports profiles for Outsports.com and Lavender Locker Room II.
Film Development
As a result of interest in movies based on her novels, Warren has moved into active development herself as an executive producer, in partnership with Greg Zanfardino of Moniker Entertainment.
At present, she has several docudrama projects on her slate, including an Australian group's novel search for the wreck site of Amelia Earhart's aircraft in Papua New Guinea.
Activism and Politics
Warren's political activism started during the 1960s, with efforts -- while still a Reader's Digest editor -- to have American media recognize the individuality of Ukrainians and other ethnic groups in the USSR.
In the 1970s Warren was the plaintiffs' spokesperson for Susan Smith v. Reader's Digest, a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a class-action victory for women. As a former amateur athlete, Warren helped lead a group of women distance runners who forced the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union, the then governing body of amateur sports in the U.S.) to change discriminatory rules in the mid-70s.
More recently, in the free-speech realm, Warren has been a named plaintiff in both federal lawsuits over Internet censorship -- namely ACLU v. Reno (which went to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a victory for the plaintiffs) and the more recent ACLU lawsuit over the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was also struck down as unconstitutional.
Her most recent political step was her first time out as a candidate in 2007. She ran for city council in West Hollywood, CA, on a platform that included a goal of WeHo being the first in the country to offer universal single-payer healthcare to its residents. She lost to an incumbent, but ran a creditable campaign and got 23 percent of the vote.
As recognition for her activism and contribution to public, Warren has won a number of awards, including New York City's Public Advocate Award and the Barry Goldwater Award.
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More information on Warren can be found at : www.wildcatpress.com and www.patricianellwarren.com.
