Christopher Bram Talks Book EMINENT OUTLAWS on THEATER TALK This Weekend, 9/28-10/1

Christopher Bram’s new book, Eminent Outlaws – The Gay Writers Who Changed America, chronicles the literary revolution after World War II, in which gay men writing about homosexual themes and relationships helped to inspire the quantum shift in the cultural acceptance of LGBT equality that we are seeing today.

THEATER TALK - Christopher Bram, co-hosted by Michael Riedel of the New York Post and producer Susan Haskins, will premiere at 1 a.m. on Friday, September 28 (2012; early Saturday morning) on Thirteen/PBS, followed in New York City on CUNY TV* Saturday at 8:30 PM, Sunday at 12:30 PM, and Monday at 7:30 AM, 1:30 PM, and 7:30 PM.

Bram, author of the novel Father of Frankenstein (on which the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Gods and Monsters was based) and eight other novels, talks about the influence of: Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Allen Ginsberg, Edward Albee and Mart Crowley, who began writing at a time when homosexuals were treated with open contempt by critics and the rest of the mainstream. He then moves on to discussing a younger generation including: Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, and Tony Kushner whose works are landmarks in the present day battle for gay civil rights.

It was Vidal’s novel, The City And The Pillar, Bram tells Riedel and Haskins, that started everything. Published in 1948, two weeks after the release of the first Kinsey Report on sexuality and one week before Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, it was “slaughtered” by critics, who “seemed motivated by disgust.” (Vidal and Capote first met in 1947 and were competitive until Capote’s death in 1984). Because of The City And The Pillar, Bram refers to Vidal, who died this year not long after the publication of Eminent Outlaws, as “the godfather of gay literature.”

THEATER TALK is the weekly series dedicated to the world of the stage. The not-for-profits Theater Talk Productions and CUNY TV, jointly produce the program, which is taped in the Himan Brown TV and Radio Studios at The City University of New York (CUNY) TV in Manhattan, and is distributed to more than a hundred public television stations nationwide.

THEATER TALK is made possible in part by The New York State Council on the Arts, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The TDF/TAP Plus Program, The CUNY TV Foundation and The Friends of THEATER TALK.

*CUNY TV, the City University of New York television station, is carried in New York City’s five boroughs – on Channel 75 on Time Warner and Cablevision, Channel 77 on RCN, and Channel 30 on Verizon FiOS.