Jun 20, 2008  |  By: AMY CAVANAUGH  | COMMENTS     

Washington and Baltimore are probably not the first two cities that come to mind when you think of gay literature, but this weekend features two events that celebrate local and national gay writers.
Baltimore will hold the first Lesbian Literary Festival. Meanwhile, poetry journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Split This Rock poetry festival will offer a tour, GLBT Poets of Washington, which takes participants to literary sites in Dupont Circle.

Chris Bittner, a lesbian who owns Baltimore bookstore Read Street Books, teamed up with lesbian writer KI Thompson and her partner Kathi Isserman to organize the Lesbian Literary Festival, a three-day affair organized around Baltimore Pride, which also happens this weekend.

“We were talking about books and events [Thompson and Isserman] were going to, and we decided to try to put something together for this area,” Bittner says. “We started planning it last February.”

Bittner adds that there are three big annual lesbian literary festivals: one in Palm Springs, another in Atlanta and the Golden Crown Literary Society conference, which will be held in Phoenix this year.

“The price for these is prohibitive to a great many people, so the objective was to have something low cost, a low-key kind of thing, where people can come and relax and enjoy,” she says.

The festival kicks off June 20 at 8 p.m. with readings of women’s erotica by authors Radclyffe, KI Thompson, VK Powell, Ali Vali, Rachel Spangler and I Beachem at Read Street Books.

Saturday’s events include an author panel, “What We Write and Why” at 10 a.m. followed by lunch and socializing with the authors and an author reading at 2 p.m. during which authors read their favorite selections from each other’s books. All three events will be held at the restaurant Night of the Cookers, 881 N. Howard St.

The Saturday evening event is the LitFest Women’s Pride Dance, with DJ, light menu and cash bar from 8 p.m. to midnight at Sydonne’s, 713 N. Howard St.

BACK IN D.C., the GLBT Poets of Washington tour will be held Saturday from 10:30 a.m. noon, and participants will meet outside the Starbucks on the north side of Dupont Circle. Led by Dan Vera, the managing editor of White Crane Journal, a gay men’s spiritual quarterly magazine, the tour traces gay literature in Washington from the 1970s to the present.

Vera says the tour focuses on poets who are either deceased or no longer live in their homes, out of deference to the authors. One important stop on the tour is the site of the Furies Collective, a lesbian literary group of feminist writers (including Rita Mae Brown), who felt that their writing was being sidelined because there were more gay male writers in D.C.

As a highlight of the tour, Vera located audio recordings of poets Audre Lorde and Allen Ginsberg, who read at the first March on Washington in 1979.

“It’s great that we can stop on the tour and participants can get a chance to hear them reading their poetry,” he says.

The tour also exposes hidden histories in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, something that Vera hopes to bring to other areas in D.C. with other gay literary tours.

“It’s a great experience to walk around a neighborhood I thought I knew pretty well,” Vera says. “It’s strange to think that there was a lesbian feminist separatist community in this multimillion dollar townhouse. It’s a reminder that we’re part of a long tradition in this space to live our lives openly.”