Call for Submissions for My Gay Brother

Director Chris Munch’s recent indie film festival favorite, Harry and Max, explored the complicated relationship between two gay brothers, and struck a rich vein. Uterine hormones, genetic quirk, hypothalamus size, sibling order, or distant father, they’re the stuff of many a scientific and sociological study—gay siblings. Whatever the source, it’s a common phenomenon: most of us know guys with one or more gay brothers; the subject comes up quickly when two gay men get to know each other.

Most gay men grow up as strangers in their own families, outsiders with a closely-guarded secret. But many gay men share that secret in common with someone very close by in the foxholes of the family battle, acknowledged or not: a brother. Whether they know it at first or only sense a difference, how they are alike or how surprisingly they differ, how one’s coming out affects the other, the special bond they may share as adults—or not; how having a gay brother influenced their developing identities and made them who they are today: these are some of the issues that will be addressed in the personal essays collected in My Gay Brother.

Topics and tone will be as varied as family dynamics: Mom’s reaction to another son’s coming out, sexual experimentation between siblings (twins a ++!), gay brothers with nothing but their sexual orientation in common, brothers lost to suicide or AIDS. These moving accounts will detail brotherly devotion, rivalry, loyalty, betrayal, love, laughter, and grief—in short, all the stuff of family relations, but with an intriguing queer twist.

Green Candy Press seeks beautifully written, provocative, honest, emotionally revealing and insightful, funny, sad, bitter, and joyful memoirs of growing up alongside or maintaining ties as an adult between gay men who are also siblings. Submissions should be original and not previously published in book format. Submissions should be between 6-25 typed, double-spaced manuscript pages and available as Microsoft Word documents.

Send to: Green Candy Press
601 Van Ness Avenue, E3-918
San Francisco, CA 94102,

e-mail query to andrew.mcbeth@greencandypress.com.

Hard copy submissions should include either SASE with sufficient postage for return of your ms or indication that ms may be recycled. Be sure to include phone number and e-mail address. Final selections will be paid $100 upon final acceptance of the complete manuscript.

Submissions Deadline: February 1st, 2007.

About the Editor: Kevin Bentley’s last anthology, Boyfriends from Hell, was a Lammy finalist and an InsightOut Bookclub selection. He is also the editor of Afterwords: Real Sex from Gay Men’s Diaries, and the author of Wild Animals I Have Known: Polk Street Diaries and After and Let’s Shut Out the World.