About Alyson Books



Founder Sasha Alyson launched Alyson Books in Boston, Massachusetts in 1980. There he published a wide array of groundbreaking LGBT titles—the children’s books Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s New Roommate; the first black gay anthologies In the Life and Brother to Brother; and the S/M classics Coming to Power and Leatherfolk, for example—until 1992, when he sold the press to Liberation Publications. In the years that followed Alyson relocated to Los Angeles, then later settled in New York City, publishing the most talked-about books by and for LGBT readers. Today under the ownership of Here Media, a Los Angeles, California-based entertainment company that also owns The Advocate, Out, Here! TV, and Gay.com, among other media properties, Alyson continues to serve and inspire readers as the premiere publisher of LGBT literature.



About the Publisher



Since I entered the book business in 1993, I’ve been firmly established in independent publishing. Starting in the San Francisco Bay Area at the distributor Publishers Group West, where I was an account manager for a consortium of small presses, then moving to Cleis Press, where I became associate publisher of the largest and most provocative publisher of feminist literature, I’ve been involved in virtually every area of book publishing—from sales, marketing, and publicity to editing, production, and even design.

I acquired my first book, when, after hearing Gore Vidal give a political talk in Berkeley, I tracked down his home address in Italy and wrote to ask if he’d consider my editing a book of his ground-breaking essays on sex. He faxed a reply saying, yes, he would. The resulting volume, Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking, was a national bestseller and led to my editing two more books for Cleis: Black Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual African American Fiction—the most comprehensive book of African American LGBT literature ever published—and Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, who is most famously remembered as the black gay adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and organizer of the 1963 March on Washington.

While working on Black Like Us, I also developed my fourth project, Edmund White’s Arts and Letters. This collection brought together his always-insightful writings on the arts, originally published in journals like Vanity Fair, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. My work and growing friendship with Edmund would later help open doors in the LGBT literary world when I moved to New York in 2003.

For the next four years I served as senior editor at Carroll & Graf Publishers. Although the company hadn’t been historically a publisher of gay titles, Carroll & Graf quickly became home to one of the most vibrant lines of LGBT literature ever. There I published John Rechy, James Purdy, Samuel R. Delany, Edward Albee, Leslie Feinberg, E. Lynn Harris, Andrew Holleran, Kate Clinton, Bob Smith, Cheryl Clarke, Marijane Meaker, Charles Busch, Michelangelo Signorile, Keith Boykin, and Michael Musto, as well as scores of new and previously unpublished writers.

All of which is to say that I bring a long, passionate history working with LGBT authors and their work to Alyson Books.