WRITERS
GREGORY MAGUIRE, KENYON FARROW, & MART CROWLEY
The story of Wicked author Gregory Maguire's (above, left) childhood has the timbre of fairy tale: His mother died of complications while giving birth to him, and his grief-stricken father placed him and his siblings with relatives, who sent the infant Maguire to live in a Catholic orphanage. The children returned when their father remarried, though life in the strict Maguire household was austere, and television was all but off-limits: The children were, however, allowed to watch the annual screening of The Wizard of Oz.One might see 2008 as an enchanted year for Maguire, seeing both the publication of his decidedly adult A Lion Among Men, the chronicle of another friend of Dorothy's, and the fifth anniversary of the $1 billion–grossing Broadway adaptation of Wicked.
Named a fellow by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute in 2008, Kenyon Farrow (center) is devoting his year to writing and researching the spike in HIV rates in black men in the United States. He is also the public education director for Queers for Economic Justice and served as the director of communications for the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project. A well-known blogger, Farrow published Letters From Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out in 2005 and is a contributor to Utne Reader, Poz, and City Limits.
It's been 40 years since Mart Crowley (above, right) wrote The Boys in the Band, the seminal off-Broadway show that became the first commercially successful play to chronicle gay life to mainstream America. In 1970, Crowley's film adaptation of Boys was released. This year Alyson Books released a special anniversary edition of the play with a new introduction by Tony Kushner; and in November the movie was released on DVD for the first time.
