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DON
BACHARDY is one of the most distinguished of American portrait
artists. A Los Angeles area native, he attended UCLA and then studied
at Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, and at the Slade School
of Art, London. He has had shows in numerous major galleries, museums,
and libraries, including, most recently, the Huntington Library,
Pasadena, which houses the papers of his longtime lover, Christopher
Isherwood. His work resides in numerous collections, for example,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C., and the National Portrait Gallery, London. His
official portrait of former Gov. Jerry Brown hangs in the California
State Capitol. His work has been published in numerous exhibit catalogs
and journal articles, on dust jackets of authors from E.M. Forster
to Gavin Geoffrey Dillard, in promotions for motion pictures such
as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, collected in books
by Twelvetrees Press, and in Stars in My Eyes. He is president
of the Board of Directors of the Isherwood Foundation. The UCLA
Library has long held his portraits of Gerald Heard, Anaïs
Nin, and Aldous Huxley. On the occasion of this exhibit and conference
Bachardy has donated to the Library one of his portraits of Paul
Monette, used for this website. It is rare for Bachardy to have
used only black and white in a portrait at this point in his career,
as he has done in this pensive and revealing study of Monette. He
lives in Santa Monica.
BETTY BERZON is a UCLA alumna
and earned her Ph.D. in psychology from International College, Los
Angeles. She is a practicing psychotherapist, a member of the American
Psychological Association since 1964. She is a longtime activist
and the editor of the pioneering work, Positively Gay,
first published in 1979 and still in print in its third edition.
Her recent memoir, Surviving Madness, won the Lambda Literary
Award. Other works include Permanent Partners: Building Gay
and Lesbian Relationships that Last and Setting Them Straight:
You Can Do Something about Bigotry and Homophobia in Your Life.
She was the National President, Gay Academic Union, 1977-1979 and
has served on numerous boards, such as that of the Los Angeles Gay
and Lesbian Community Services Center. The Los Angeles Gay &
Lesbian Writers Group, which included Malcolm Boyd, Katherine V.
Forrest, Michael Nava, Mark Thompson, and Paul Monette, among others,
first met at her house. Monette’s difficult poems written
after the death of Roger Horwitz were shown to Berzon, who recognized
the necessity and aptness of this bold new style Monette cultivated
for what would become Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog. Berzon
lives in Los Angeles with her partner Teresa DeCrescenzo, director
of the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS).
ROGER BOURLAND is professor
of theory and composition, UCLA Department of Music. He received
his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He received the Koussevitzky
Prize in Composition at Tanglewood, the John Knowles Paine Fellowship
at Harvard, two ASCAP Grants to Young Composers, numerous Meet the
Composers grants, and was a co-founder of the Boston-based consortium
“Composers in Red Sneakers.” Bourland has composed over
one hundred works for all media: solo, instrumental, chamber, vocal
and choral music, electro-acoustic music, and music for orchestra.
His works are published by E.C. Schirmer Music / Boston and Associated
Music Publishers, Inc., and recorded on Northeastern Records, 1750
Arch, OpenLoop, and GM Recordings. He set to music selections from
the introduction to Paul Monette’s Love Alone: 18 Elegies
for Rog, premiered by the Los Angeles Gay Men’s Chorus
in 1993.
CHRIS FREEMAN received his
Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University and is professor of
English, St. John’s University, Minnesota. He is the editor
(with James J. Berg) of Conversations with Christopher Isherwood
and the Lambda Literary Award winning The Isherwood Century:
Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood. He is
on the advisory board of the Isherwood Foundation. He received one
of UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections’s
first James and Sylvia Thayer Fellowships to do research in the
Monette Papers held by the Department. Freeman is the authorized
biographer of Paul Monette and has conducted dozens of interviews
toward that project, titled Becoming Paul Monette. He is
also editing Monette’s journals for publication. Freeman is
now on leave from teaching, and he resides in Los Angeles.
DAVID GROFF is an editor and
poet whose most recent volume of poems, Theory of Devolution,
was chosen for inclusion in the National Poetry Series. His work
as an editor included working with Paul Monette on his novels Afterlife
and Halfway Home for Crown Publishers. He serves as Monette’s
literary executor along with Monette’s agent Wendy Weil. He
has shepherded into publication Monette’s last writing, a
brief fable entitled Sanctuary. He lives in New York City.
ERIC GUTIERREZ’s work
has been anthologized in the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Indivisible
and The Man I Might Become. He is co-editor of Suave:
the Latin Male and writer of the theater work By the Hand
of the Father, which aired on PBS. For television, he wrote
the gay episodes of the GLAAD-nominated Telemundo sitcom Los
Beltran. He has just received his degree from Harvard Divinity
School, where he delivered the commencement address, “Walk
Humbly: A Challenge to Religion in American Public Life.”
He attended meetings of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Writers
Group, mentored by Paul Monette, and he has served on the Advisory
Committee of the Monette-Horwitz Trust. He lives in Boston.
BERNICE HORWITZ is the mother
of Roger Horwitz, 1941-1986, the partner of Paul Monette celebrated
in Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog and Borrowed Time:
An AIDS Memoir. She is an honorary member of the Advisory Committee
of the Monette-Horwitz Trust. She lives in Skokie, Illinois.
BRIAN LEUNG holds an M.F.A.
in Creative Writing from Indiana University and teaches English
at California State University, Northridge. His fiction and poetry
have appeared in numerous literary journals and his stories have
been collected in World Famous Love Acts. A native of San
Diego and born to a Chinese father and Euro-American mother, Leung
embodies the “post gay” strain of current American writing
with characters embodying a wide range of age, gender, racial, and
other diversities some of which Paul Monette embodied even in his
first novel and moved increasingly toward in his later fiction.
DAN LUCKENBILL is staff, YRL
Special Collections. He is a UCLA alumnus and has worked at the
Library since 1970, where he has curated over a dozen exhibits and
written numerous exhibit catalogs and text for web exhibits. His
essay about his friends Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy appeared
in the Lambda Literary Award-winning The Isherwood Century.
He has published gay fiction since 1975. With the late Daniel G.
Calder, UCLA professor of English, he was instrumental in soliciting
the papers of Paul Monette for the UCLA Library, and he is the cataloger
of those papers and curator of the current exhibit, One Person’s
Truth. He is on the advisory board of the Isherwood Foundation,
secretary of the Board of Directors, ONE National Gay & Lesbian
Archives, Los Angeles, and serves on the Advisory Committee of the
Monette-Horwitz Trust.
ROBERT L. MONETTE, the brother
of Paul Monette, is an accountant and lawyer who lives in Pennsylvania.
Paul Monette designated him as the Trustee of the Monette-Horwitz
Trust, and he has discharged these duties since his brother’s
death in 1995. The Advisory Committee of the Trust gives its recommendations
to Robert Monette as Trustee, and The Trust has given awards to
26 recipients, both individuals and organizations, for their significant
contributions toward eradicating homophobia..
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES is a poet,
a novelist, and an essayist of personal delights of Los Angeles
life in the Los Angeles Times. She is the founder and director
of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the
University of Southern California. Her awards and prizes include
a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Witter-Bynner Award from the
Library of Congress, an NEA fellowship, the di Castagnola Award,
the Dylan Thomas Poetry Award, an Ingram-Merrill award, and several
Pushcart Prizes. Her poetry collections include An Octave Above
Thunder and Camouflage. Sparrow, her elegiac
work to her husband, actor David Dukes, who died in 2000, was a
National Book Award finalist. She holds a unique place in connection
with Paul Monette and this exhibit and conference. When Monette
was no longer able to write after the death of Roger Horwitz, it
was to his notebook alone that he confided his rough drafts of poems
in a challenging new style. He then shared these and other drafts
with his poet friend Muske-Dukes, transferring them to UCLA in a
folder labeled “Carol poems.” The process of sharing
and writing new poems with Monette has been written about by Muske-Dukes
most beautifully in her essay, “All Through the Night.”
CHRISTOPHER RICE is the author
of the New York Times bestselling novels, A Density
of Souls and The Snow Garden, and the current thriller
set in West Hollywood and central California, Light Before Day.
He now lives and works in West Hollywood, California. He writes
a regular column for The Advocate and is a sought after
participant on numerous writing panels throughout California and
the rest of the country. Among influences in his life and writing,
he has cited Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story.
VICTORIA STEELE is head of
the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special
Collections. A former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, she
holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Southern California
with a specialty in design, her dissertation topic being the British
fashion designer Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon. She lectures frequently
on topics in art and fashion history, most recently on Daumier.
She serves on numerous nonprofit boards and is the author of an
award-winning book on library development.
MARK THOMPSON is a former
Senior Editor of The Advocate, founded in Los Angeles,
the first and longest-lived gay liberation political and arts journal.
He produced one issue with Paul Monette featured on the cover. Thompson
is an author, editor, and photographer, most known for his seminal
works on gay spirit, including, Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning,
reprinted 2005. He has just finished a traveling show of portraits
of pioneer gay leaders and gurus, many of whom were interviewed
for Gay Spirit. He is also a psychotherapist. Among numerous
community services, he has served as vice president, ONE National
Gay & Lesbian Archives, and he is on the Advisory Committee
of the Monette-Horwitz Trust. He lives in Los Angeles with his partner
Episcopal priest and writer Malcolm Boyd. On the occasion of this
exhibit and conference, Thompson has donated to the UCLA Library
his portrait photograph of Paul Monette.
WINSTON WILDE is an alumnus
of Antioch University and is a psychotherapist with offices in Beverly
Hills, California. He is also a professor of Sexuality and Gender
Studies and has conducted pioneering research into the sexualities
of blind persons. His book exploring patterns of queer love is in
publication. He is the surviving lover of Paul Monette and chairs
the Advisory Committee of the Monette-Horwitz Trust. The Trust,
according to the wishes of Paul Monette who endowed the Trust, has
to date granted 26 awards to individuals and organizations fighting
to eradicate homophbobia.
TERRY WOLVERTON is a Los Angeles
feminist art historian, performance artist, poet, fiction writer,
and editor. Insurgent Muse, her history of the Los Angeles
Woman’s Building and her involvement with its services and
administration 1977-1989, won the Judy Grahn Award from the Publisher’s
Triangle and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. She has
been a finalist for seven other Lambda Literary Award nominations.
Among many other grants and awards, she has received numerous Los
Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and California Arts Council
fellowships, as well as awards from Christopher Street West, Southern
California Library for Social Research, and the Gay and Lesbian
Academic Union. She is in demand as editor, teacher, and reader,
having presented her recent novel in verse, Embers, as
a staged reading at the Los Angeles Public Library. She teaches
writing privately at Writers at Work, which she founded in 1997
and also provides management consultation through ConsultHer, founded
in 1982. She serves on the Advisory Committee of the Monette-Horwitz
Trust. At the GLAAD benefit honoring Paul Monette shortly before
his death, she read her poem, “As Vulcan Falls from Heaven
(for Paul Monette).”
THOMAS WORTHAM has been chair
of the UCLA Department of English since 1997. His scholarly interests
include Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain,
all of whose works he has edited. Since 1984 he has served as the
editor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and is currently
working on a new critical edition of Emerson’s poems and editions
of Howells’s early political writings and radical essays of
the 1890s and early 20th century. He is on the advisory board of
the Isherwood Foundation.

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