Michael Schiavi: "Celluloid Activist, The Life and Times of Vito Russo", April 2011

Book about gay liberation and AIDS activist

Publisher's Description

Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read.

But Russo was much more than a pioneering journalist and author. A founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and cofounder of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Russo lived at the center of the most important gay cultural turning points in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. His life as a cultural Zelig intersects a crucial period of social change, and in some ways his story becomes the story of a developing gay revolution in America. A frequent participant at “zaps” and an organizer of Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) cabarets and dances—which gave the New York gay and lesbian community its first social alternative to Mafia-owned bars—Russo made his most enduring contribution to the GAA with his marshaling of “Movie Nights,” the forerunners to his worldwide Celluloid Closet lecture tours that gave gay audiences their first community forum for the dissection of gay imagery in mainstream film.

Biographer Michael Schiavi unravels Vito Russo’s fascinating life story, from his childhood in East Harlem to his own heartbreaking experiences with HIV/AIDS. Drawing on archival materials, unpublished letters and journals, and more than two hundred interviews, including conversations with a range of Russo’s friends and family from brother Charlie Russo to comedian Lily Tomlin to pioneering activist and playwright Larry Kramer, Celluloid Activist provides an unprecedented portrait of a man who defined gay-rights and AIDS activism.

Blurbs

“My dear friend, Vito Russo, was a darling and a daring man; more importantly, he was a giant in the fields of gay and AIDS activism. In Celluloid Activist, Michael Schiavi recounts Vito's full life, starting with a New York childhood that Martin Scorsese might have written, through Vito’s penning of the indispensable Celluloid Closet, the first major study of gays and lesbians in film, and finally through Vito’s tireless work as an AIDS activist. All this, plus a look at Vito up a tree (literally) at the Stonewall Riots! Celluloid Activist is a long-overdue examination of a man who helped put gay rights on the map. In the words of Edith Ann, one of Vito’s other good buddies, ‘And that’s the truth-h-h-h!’”—Lily Tomlin

"A dynamic, emotional, and fascinating look at the life of the spellbinding gay activist Vito Russo."—Craig Zadan, producer of Chicago and Hairspray

"This important book brings both an era and its sensibilities to life by engagingly telling the story of a major gay civil rights activist. Russo’s contribution to the movement for gay equality through practically inventing the field of LGBT film history is enormous. Readers will find themselves inspired by Russo’s unflagging courage, passion, and downright tenacity.”—David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution

I recall Vito as a passionate and inspiring gay liberation leader, a sweet man, and a pioneering film historian, who went out of his way to acknowledge all the hard work that went into our common effort to retrieve a suppressed past.--Jonathan Ned Katz, Co-Director OutHistory.org, author Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality.

Author

Michael Schiavi is associate professor of English and coordinator of English as a second language at the New York Institute of Technology’s Manhattan campus. His articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and College Literature.

Publication Data

University of Wisconsin Press, April 2011

LC: 2010044627 PN

320 pp. 25 b/w illus.

Cloth $29.95 ISBN 978-0-299-28230-1

e-book $14.95 ISBN 978-0-299-28233-2

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