John Weir

John Weir is a cisgender gay white guy from New Jersey, though not the part of Jersey anyone knows: rural Northwestern New Jersey, in the Musconetcong River valley, where his parents moved from suburban NYC in 1959 when he was three months old, and where he shared a bedroom with his older brother in a souped-up log cabin surrounded by woods and streams and over-run by beasts of the forest, some of them tame and living in the back yard: horses, dogs, cats, goats, and whatever strays wandered in. His father worked in Manhattan for NBC TV; his mother trained animals and directed musicals at the community theater in Clinton, on the South Branch of the Raritan River.

Otherwise: he went to public schools in NJ and then to Kenyon College in the middle of Ohio, where he majored in English and was President, for a minute, of the Dramatic Club. After college, he moved to NYC, to Manhattanworld, which was not yet Mayor Mike's Shining Global Capital, but a city in recovery from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and in the process of being surrendered by Mayor Ed Koch to real estate mavens - a process continued by all the city's various mayors for the next 30 years.

He got an MFA in Fiction Writing at Columbia University, which is absurdly expensive now, but which, in the late 1980s, was remotely affordable, especially if you had a crooked accountant who got thousands of dollars back from the IRS and then promptly vanished when the IRS decided it was time for an audit.

Then he published his first novel, *The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket*, Harper & Row (at the time - now HarperCollins), 1989, which he once described to a closeted boyfriend's inquisitive parents as, "A boys' action-adventure novel that ends in tears." It's about a gay guy who gets AIDS and dies. Big seller.

Then he got a job teaching Creative Writing at Queens College/CUNY, which is, as you might have guessed, in Queens.

Then he published a second novel, *What I Did Wrong*, Viking, 2006.

What else do you want to know? His face shows up really briefly in the corner of the TV screen in various recordings of an ACT UP demonstration that interrupted *Dan Rather's CBS Evening News* in 1992, and if you google "ACT UP Dan Rather," you'll get a link to the clip. More recently, he stood up with some Queer Nation pals at Carnegie Hall and yelled "Your Silence Is Killing Russian Gays" at the start of a concert conducted by Russian Putinista Valery Gergiev, in order to protest Gergiev's collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin who, in 2013 and even now, was/is busy passing violently anti-gay laws that imperil the lives of LGBT Russians.

A citizen of Manhattanworld for 33 years, he now lives in Brooklyn, in a bourgeois pig neighborhood, where he has learned, of course, to make coffee.

He will friend anyone - anyone - on Facebook.

[The swell author photo is by Beowulf Sheehan.]