![]() ![]() ![]() The woman and Pisarra submitted their work to the same magazine. “I ran a writers group for them,” Pisarra said, “I encouraged a super-talented woman to send her work out.” He has helped homeless people with mental health issues to find housing. Pisarra has held a variety of jobs – many of which have involved the arts. With lines like these, he gives Shakespeare a run for his money. “Devour me! Think me not some crazy nut!,” Pisarra writes in one of his sonnets. Released in 2019, the volume of sexy, playful sonnets received glowing reviews from the Washington Post, the Blade and other outlets. “I said to her, ‘I never want to see any of these people again except you,’” Pisarra said, “She inspired me to get into poetry.”ĭavis wrote the introduction to Pisarra’s poetry collection “Infinity Standing Up” (Capturing Fire Press). He would have dropped out of the group, if he hadn’t met writer Mare Davis, now his close friend. “There were, like, 10 people in this apartment,” Pisarra said, “there was a terrible woman sitting next to me.” Pisarra got turned on to writing poetry when he went to a meeting of a gay and lesbian writers group. “I don’t write that often,” Pisarra said, “I started writing the stories in ‘You’re Pretty Gay’ 20 years ago.”Ī prodigious reader, Pisarra has always “written to some degree,” he said. Some of the stories in “You’re Pretty Gay” were originally created for the stage. Since then, Pisarra has been creating – performing and writing his own material. “I wasn’t interested in being closeted,” Pisarra said, “I wrote. His sense of relief was related to being a young gay man in the late 1980s. Because your face and body don’t match.’” “She told me, ‘you’re a grotesque,’”Pisarra said, “‘You won’t work until you’re in your fifties. Then, the teacher told them how she thought they’d be cast. In college, a professor had the students sit in a circle. Pisarra graduated from Hofstra University in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in theater. He was out in college, Pisarra said, “but I wasn’t getting laid.” That changed when he moved to New Orleans after college. “I sobbed the night I came out,” he said. Pisarra was a college freshman when he came out. “As a teenager, I recognized that I hadn’t outgrown it,” Pisarra said. He consulted books and a priest, which wasn’t helpful. “I had a crush on a boy in kindergarten,” Pisarra said. “There was such denial in the culture then,” Pisarra said.įrom early on, he had feelings for men. When Pisarra was growing up, being gay wasn’t even remotely on the horizon. There, except for living in Oxon Hill for a year, he grew up in Silver Spring. ![]() When he was in the third grade, he moved to Maryland. Pisarra, whose first short story collection “Publick Spanking” was published in 1996, was born in Orange, N.J. “In my quest to bed mankind, I tended to avoid perfection’s rejection,” says the narrator of “Every Man for Myself.” Pisarra’s characters yearn to find love, sex, and who they really are. “All anyone could remember of her was that chair, how she sat in it for the last 40 years,” Pisarra writes, “immobile as ‘Jeopardy’ and the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ glared at her night after night.” In “Granny,” siblings gather after their mother’s death. “I love traveling,” says the narrator of “The Hat from Hell, “I got this hat when I was in Hell back in 1992.” I haven’t received a gift from you or your husband in ten years.”Īnother of Pisarra’s tales revolves around a trip to hell. Claus I didn’t even know you were alive,” says the narrator of “Arctic Chill.” “I didn’t even know you were real. You’ll find everything from adolescent bullies fighting over a rare caterpillar to a character taking an AIDS test and, later, meeting up with Mrs. ![]() In “You’re Pretty Gay,” there are gay bars in New York and New Orleans. Pisarra, who lives in Manhattan, gives readers a mosaic of wit, surrealism, sex, queerness, memory, mortality and self-discovery. This collection “is a prime example of Drew Pisarra’s dangerously funny and queerly inventive brain,” said Kevin Sampsell, author of “This Is Between Us.” “Each story is its own performance, its own shattering of expectations and social mores.” But there’s no other way to describe “You’re Pretty Gay.” The word “unique” is so hackneyed that it’s a cliche to say it’s a cliche. Pisarra, 56, whose new short story collection “You’re Pretty Gay” is just out from Chaffinch Press, has worked at everything from ventriloquism to domestic work. If you think that authors don’t encounter the absurdity and grit of everyday life or that all writers do is drink coffee (or sip stronger libations) while looking at the sunset, you haven’t met Pisarra. They’d insist that “this most important matter be dealt with as soon as the war ends,” Pisarra said. But that didn’t soften the heart of the toothpaste company. ![]()
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