Cherishing the Hours
Pulitzer Prize-winning gay author Michael Cunningham

The afternoon the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, Michael Cunningham said, "I hadn't expected to be celebrating,'' when the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation called him up to get his reaction to winning the Pulitzer for his novel The Hours, making him the first gay novelist to win the Pulitzer in the 81-year-history of the prize. "My partner, Ken Korbett, is my mentor and muse and first and most important reader. He's a clinical psychologist, and he's with a patient right now, and when he's done, we'll have a good cry and figure out what to do next."

What happened next was that The Hours went on to garner every other top literary award, and the queer literary community celebrated. "In a world where The Hours can win the Pulitzer, are things actually getting better for gay and lesbian writers?" asked one paper gleefully.

The Hours was Cunningham’s variation on the theme of Virginia Woolf’s rich and complex novel Mrs. Dalloway. Of course, Virginia Woolf already has a special room of her own in the queer literary canon. In Cunningham’s revisiting of her dream-like work, he interweaves a fictionalized Virginia Woolf with the story of a present-day 52-year-old woman who is planning a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS. "There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

Cunningham’s other novels and stories also include gay characters and the contemplation of traditional notions of family and self. A Home at the End of the World depicts the fragile, charged relationships of a woman and two men, one of whom is gay, who decide to move to a small house in rural New York to raise a child together.

Cunningham will be in town Monday, October 15, to read his work as part of the 2001-2002 Margarett Root Brown Houston Reading Series. Cunningham will read from his work in the Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue, at 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:45 p.m. The cost: $5 suggested donation; free for students and senior citizens. The reading will be followed by a brief on-stage interview, Q&A with the audience, and a book sale and signing. For information, contact Inprint at 713/521-2026 or www.inprint-inc.org. –Ann Walton Sieber