Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working-Class Queers contains work by twenty writers (Rigoberto González, Carter Sickels, John Gilgun, Judy Grahn, Tara Hardy, Keith Banner, and Renny Christopher, to name a few, who speak meaningfully-in short fiction, memoir, performance pieces, and prose poems-about queers in and from the working class.
Blue, Too entertains and challenges, but most of all provides a touchstone for queer working-class writers and readers, illuminating our realities, our struggles, and our resistance to assimilation and mental gentrification.
Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working-Class Queers contains some reader favorites from Everything I Have Is Blue (out of print since 2008) but includes nearly 400 pages of new material, including a reprint of a 1978 Judy Grahn story, a new translation from Italian, and excerpts from John Gilgun's unpublished autobiography.
As a sourcebook for working-class and queer studies, meanwhile, Blue, Too features two special sections: "A Blue Study," a guide for readers, writers, and scholars to using Blue, Too to examine the interlocking issues of queerness and social class, including discussion questions and prompts for writing and mini-research projects that connect the reader with working-class and LGBT scholarship; "Reading Blue," an extensive annotated bibliography of more than 500 items that represents the first-ever attempt to create an exhaustive listing of materials related to queers and class; and "Class/Mates: Further Outings in the Literatures and Cultures of the Ga(y)ted Community," an expanded theoretical and critical essay that reviews the history and present of working-class queers in literature, media, and pop culture.
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"Blue, Too is, without a doubt, the authority on working-class queer writing in the English language." (Lambda Literary Review)
"Book of the Year.... Ricketts' (essay) 'Class/Mates: Further Outings in the Literatures and Cultures of the Ga(y)ted Community' is worth the price of the book." (GayToday)
"[W]ill shatter your ideas of who and what queer people are." (The Good Men Project)
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About the Author: Wendell Ricketts is the editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life (2005), and his fiction and poetry have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, modern words, and The Long Story, among others. From 1986 to 1996 he was theater and dance critic for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco, California, and his writing about literature, travel, politics, the media, and contemporary social issues have appeared in such publications as Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, Contact Quarterly, The Advocate, Dance Ink, Marriage and Family Review, Out, QW, Spin, Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, and 30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. He has worked professionally as a translator from Italian since 1998, and his work includes The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg, Trilobites: The Back To The Past Museum Guide, Woman Bites Dog: The Mafia's War on Italian Women Journalists, and excerpts of two recent Italian working-class novels (World Literature Today, November 2013).
