David Groff's Literary Legacy
Samantha Hernandez and David Groff discuss his recent award from The Publishing Triangle, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and how we move forward in today's publishing landscape
David Groff, a founding member of The Publishing Triangle, is the 2025 winner of the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Live in Suspense, published in July 2023 by Trio House Press. He took the time to speak with me about his career in publishing, his writing, and his LGBTQ+ literary advocacy.
Samantha Hernandez: Congratulations on your recent award. Could you tell me about your history with the Publishing Triangle? How did you get started with them?
David Groff: In the 1980s, I was a book editor at Crown Publishers, a fairly commercial and corporate house that backed my efforts to publish gay and lesbian books. I began to connect more and more with other gay, lesbian, bi, and trans publishing folks, to talk about how we could better advocate for our books and find readers for them. Certain organizations like ACT UP and GLAAD, what’s now called the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, were starting up, along with a lot of professional organizations, as well as Lambda Literary, so we realized it would be good for us to be connected and proactive, whether we were in corporate publishing or were booksellers or literary agents or authors. We needed a place to exchange strategies about how to get our books past editorial boards, how to sell them, and how to get out of some of the ghettoization that queer books suffered at that moment and still suffer today. The prevailing corporate notion at that time was there were only so many gay men and there were even fewer lesbians, so how could these books, however worthy, make real money? We were trying to show that they could.
The other imperative was our vulnerability around what was going on in the United States at the time. Reagan was still in office in 1988 when the Publishing Triangle began, and then George H. W. Bush took over, and both of their administrations were busy essentially ignoring the AIDS epidemic. Jesse Helms was soon to go after the NEA for funding transgressive performance artists, and that was something that we pushed back on. So there was a real sense of threat and a real sense of crisis. That threat and that crisis was leading more queer people to buy books. They were seeking the community and solidarity that the solitary act of reading books can provide.
That urgency brought us together around programming, book awards, the desire to connect with each other–and the chance that maybe you’d find a date. Let's never diminish that motive for activism.
SH: I want to go back to what you said about how the crisis led to people buying books. How was that something that you experienced firsthand?
DG: Let’s start with why queer and trans people have always sought out novels, nonfiction, and poetry. For a long time, even after Stonewall, books were all we had. We didn’t have many movies, we had next to no television shows, we had inconsistent cultural discourse. We did have the printed page. Books told us who we were, where we came from, who we might become. And the intimacy of the page, that bond between writer and reader, in volume after volume, that array of voices is like having your own friendship network.
There was a kind of book that manifested in those years that defined that community work for me: the anthology. From This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color to the Men on Men fiction series, to collections like Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology, Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, and dozens more.
With the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, we began to have books that provided narratives, insights, language innovation, mourning, and activism in all different genres. Some of these books were best sellers, like Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On, and others changed the cultural and literary discourse in subtle and sustaining ways. People were writing about a calamity even as it was happening, and when we think of the literature of past catastrophes, much of it was written well after the catastrophe happened. These books, supported by the Publishing Triangle and Lambda Literary, a strong array of bookstores, and a larger and more diverse network of media outlets, found readers and made money.
In the late eighties, I edited When Someone You Know Has AIDS: A Practical Guide, a project originated by Len Martelli, and it sold a huge number of copies, some 20,000 in paperback. We even did an updated version of it. I published Paul Monette's AIDS fiction, which sold hugely, and Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS. I also edited The Culture of Desire by Frank Browning, which I think was the first hardcover from a mainstream house ever to have two shirtless men on the cover. It sold tens of thousands of copies, not only because of the cover, but because it asked a question vital at the time: what does it mean to create a culture centered on desire? And I acquired Reinventing the Family: The Emerging Story of Lesbian and Gay Parents, by Laura Benkov, P.h.D., which helped shape the discourse around LGBTQ+ families.
In the mid-1990s, when AIDS became a more manageable disease–at least if you lived in a rich country and had health insurance–the queer publishing business subsided somewhat. LGBTQ+ people grew more accepted and assimilated, the cultural urgency turned elsewhere, and queer lit had a lot more competition from other media. LGBTQ+ bookstores were hit hard by Amazon and the corporate concentration of bookselling. With the advent of the internet, the conversations we had in public and on the page were now often occurring online, or in the domesticized sphere. Queer life became more privatized.
Yet the variety of books and the range of identities of authors have grown, and big publishers are still doing some books that are popular and often nicely risky. And there is an entire array of independent presses publishing culture-forward LGBTQ+ books. As an independent editor, I’ve worked on a lot of LGBTQ+ books that have created new and intimate conversations, the single author’s voice speaking to a community of individuals.
SH: You’ve spoken about how when you began, your work was urgent, and I'm sure over the course of time it went through different iterations of urgency. What I’m curious about is how do you approach the time that we're in now, taking into consideration how things have changed, or not changed, or changed and reverted?
DG: As I said the night I accepted the Karlsberg Award, “An epidemic of hate endangers us all. The virus of fascism threatens our democracy, our climate, our fellow humans who are immigrants or otherwise oppressed, as well as every single queer person.” LGBTQ+ people are under the same kind of oppression and physical and psychic and social threat that they endured in the eighties and nineties. We've seen it in book bans that have arisen certainly before Trump's second term and are now even more prevalent, and were have just been sustained by the Supreme Court. We've seen that with the vast assault on trans people and on trans books. We've seen it with the recent Supreme Court decision banning gender-affirming care for trans minors, which is also a policy that NYU Langone and all the hospitals here in New York have quietly adopted, much to my fury. We see it in the calls in state legislatures and from the Southern Baptist Convention to revoke the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. I think we're going to see a surge of books that will give people context and community and the ability to move forward in increasingly dire times.
SH: Everything you’re saying makes me wonder if the work that queer artists, publishers, and people advocating for them are meant to do is just this continued endeavor of visibility. And it makes me wonder what else can we do at this moment?
DG: I think that we can keep up the practice of protest, even as the issues, the arenas, and the dynamics of our responses will vary, whether it's fighting book bans, or celebrating drag queen story hours, or using our words to fight for our fundamental rights. Books don’t have to be overtly activist-minded or justice-seeking. Their voices, their presence alone will have impact.
SH: I’m also curious about how your work in editing, publishing, and advocacy has affected your own writing.
DG: I’ve felt sustained and inspired by the writers I worked with. Going deep into other writers’ manuscripts is a great way to learn how to tell a story, create vivid and original language, and connect with readers. LGBTQ+ books I’ve edited have influenced my own writing, which grapples so much with the impact, legacy, and metaphor of AIDS and HIV and how to invent and enact a queer life, and a queer love.
It’s hard to be an editor as well as a writer. I guess it’s hard to be anything else and also be a writer. But editing takes up a huge amount of time, and your head gets stuffed with other people’s words and needs. Also, editing is a service profession, and a good editor knows when to step back and allow authors and their books to stay at the center of things.
But my writing and editing practice do wonderfully converge. I remember visiting Paul Monette in California on my first trip to Los Angeles. He had just written his AIDS memoir Borrowed Time, and he was working on a novel, Afterlife, about AIDS widowers, that I’d later acquire. As an undergraduate, I’d been dazzled by Paul’s poetry, and I was in awe of meeting him. When I visited him in his little house in the Hollywood Hills, he sat down with his dog, Puck, and he read me back some of my poems, which I’d sent him.
He just read them aloud; he didn't comment on them very much–he just witnessed them. But it was such a gift to hear my own words coming out of the mouth of a writer I admired so much. It was more heartening and empowering than any workshoppy critique would have been.
Paul died of AIDS thirty years ago this past February. I’m his literary co-executor, along with his agent, making sure that his poetry and prose stay in print and reach new readers. I want to focus more of my advocacy around executorship–ensuring that our books continue to be read beyond our lifetimes. This is especially an issue for queer authors, who may not have involved and informed family members to propagate their work. I’ve seen too many good writers fade from sight just because no one was there to keep them in print. And this is a personal issue for me. Michael Messenger, my first boyfriend, a gentle and generous and bothered poet I met at the Iowa Writers Workshop, left me three boxes of his unpublished work. I need to be Michael Messenger’s messenger.
SH: I think we're living in a time when people struggle to write and talk about things as they're happening, in part because the information itself is overwhelming and there are so many ways to consume and share it. Do you feel like your experience working and writing during the AIDS crisis has translated into an ability to write about the present moment?
DG: One of the challenges we're all facing now, particularly those of us who write from a more personal and often intimate experience, is how to find a stance, a ground, and a vocabulary to respond to events so enormous in impact. With AIDS, our first summons was to be a witness to the particular. I think there's an equivalent witness we can strive for now. For my own writing, I'm still looking for evocations and rhetoric that feel true and non-propagandistic and have resonance, as part of the practice of protest.
And our writing has impact in the long term. When we think of previous historical eras, we recall the most resonant art, the most significant scientific advances, the truly major political and social events–and the rest is just detritus from which we're burned clean. The best literature we're making now, just as has been true in the AIDS epidemic, will define retrospectively what happened to us.
Our words get the last word. When I was an editor at Crown/Random House, I managed every morning to get hold of the sales figures for all the books the company shipped the previous day. Oftentimes it would be like the newest popular novel, or the eternally best-selling backlist title, Willie Mosconi on Pocket Billiards, which paid my salary. But often the book that shipped would be Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is now a century old, and it is not beach reading, and it doesn’t much involve pocket billiards.
SH: Having served as a leader in queer publishing, what do you think is the main role of leaders in this arena going forward?
DG: We need to bring in new folks who can work with the founders to help define and manage the big changes happening in the LGBTQ+ book business. We must make our LGBTQ+ cultural institutions more sustainable. We have to pry the gates open to an ever more diverse array of authors–and we have to ensure they actually have readers. And we must take action on the vital public issues that affect queer and trans writers and readers.
Most of all, we need to show up. I think the people who ultimately have the most impact are the ones who keep showing up. I've been really impressed with how my fellow writers and editors just appear and roll up their sleeves, do the work, and stay in the room. I think that's basically what I did. I doggedly stayed around.
Showing up is a leadership skill in itself. It's a matter of presence, consistency, persistence, equanimity. Whether you’re a writer or a reader, you can lift your voice.