Having read that most of his titles are out of print, I headed to two secondhand bookstores on Congress Street.Īt Yes Books, proprietor (and legendary local poet) Russ Sargent told me I was maybe the second person in 10 years to ask about Preston - which is depressing, given that the shop’s in the midst of the author’s old stomping grounds.
The cat in the photograph of Preston seated in his Park Street apartment is sitting on the finished manuscript of that book, Robert recalled.Īfter assigning the essays, I set out to find some of Preston’s work. This was shortly before Plume, an imprint of Penguin Books, published Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong, which Preston edited and to which he contributed an introduction and two essays.
#Portland or gay sex parties manual#
He worked as Preston’s assistant, helping to research facts for The Big Gay Book, an encyclopedic manual Preston authored that’s subtitled, A Man’s Survival Guide for the 90’s. Diamante, then a student at Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art), was introduced to Preston by the writer Agnes Bushell. Linda also has a connection to The Bollard - she’s the mom of Emma Hollander, our advertising director.)įor the photographs, I turned to Robert Diamante. (Al was my mentor during my days at Casco Bay Weekly, a paper Preston also wrote for. To tell us about Preston, I tapped one of his devoted friends, Al Diamon, and one of his devoted fans, Linda Hollander. Though the slogan is already fading from the public’s consciousness, Preston’s life and work deserve to be rediscovered and celebrated in his adopted hometown.
That possibility, however, seemed remote. If there’s any redeeming value to this drivel, I opined in my column for the Bangor Daily News, it derives from the possibility the quote will conjure Preston in the reader’s mind, thus associating Portland with a great author and activist. It’s too vague, too bland, and clunky, to boot. I was among the majority of Portlanders who thought the new motto sucked. I’ve been intrigued by John Preston since the City of Portland adopted the title of one of his essays as its marketing slogan two years ago this month: “Portland, Maine: Yes. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.Reflections on the life and legacy of John Preston Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering.
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