MALTESE FIRST WORDS ... NOVEL, AND OTHERWISE

I remember the first time it was pointed out to me that my name was listed in the Index of an historical reference book. I thought: "Oh, William, you ARE getting old!"

That was back in 1994 when St. Martin's Press published LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM, "The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement", a retrospective of some of The Advocate newspaper's most representative pieces from its first 25 years (1967-1992). My not very politically correct, "It's Hell Being Gay and Handicapped", written by me about a handicapped Vietnam vet I'd met in a Seattle gay bar, was included as indicative of 1971.

Partly because my gay writing was merely a part of my total published output from that time, I really hadn't yet accepted the fact that I was actually an icon of gay literature from the days when -- without my having had clue at the time -- gay fiction (and non-fiction) made its explosive en-masse major appearance on the publishing scene in formats other than the usually-before-then no queer is a happy queer and all of them have to die at books' ends.

What with my name having since appeared in several more reference books, including Professor Drewey Wayne Gunn's THE GAY MALE SLEUTH IN PRINT AND FILM: A HISTORY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY and his THE GOLDEN AGE OF GAY FICTION, I might have become inclined to consider myself entirely a "gay" writer if it hadn't been, along the way, for reminders, otherwise, like my inclusion in WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA and WHO'S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT whose listings encompassed more of my whole body of work.

Now, comes along another "something" to make me think: "Oh, William, you are DEFINITELY really getting old," by way of Wildside/Borgo Press's intended release of a comprehensive and chronological listing of my total book-title output, gay and straight, from 1969 to 2009, including the first three paragraphs from all 171 of those published works -- in its WILLIAM MALTESE'S FAMOUS FIRST WORDS. I'm finding it incredibly hard to imagine that I've been around for so long, and written so much, that not only have I and what I've written become a reference book, in and of ourselves, but that I've actually managed to write enough, over my career, to make it happen.