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PORTLAND — Bridgton author Sarah Perry will be among five authors who will explore the personal and collective lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning people at OutSpoken: An LGBTQ Author Festival on Saturday, Sept. 22.
The daylong event will be held at Hannaford Hall at the University of Southern Maine, and the festival authors will read from and discuss the inspiration behind their recent books. The author festival begins at 10 a.m. and is free and open to the public. Registration is required online at aarp.cvent.com/outspoken or 1-877-926-8300.
Perry will be one of two authors who, in the morning, will explore tragedies of past decades. The afternoon’s program explores recent experiences and will begin with a sociologist’s study of LBQ people in Portland, Maine, as well as three other U.S. cities. To conclude the festival, two authors of memoirs will discuss their journeys as family caregivers, an area of particular focus for AARP, one of the event’s sponsors.
Perry will discuss her book “After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search,” at 11 a.m. She was 12 years old when she woke up to the sound of her mother being stabbed to death in the kitchen of their home in Bridgton. It took 12 more years for the police to find and prosecute the killer, after which Perry embarked on her own journey to understand her mother and reclaim their story. In her debut memoir, recounts her mother’s life and digs into the disturbing social biases that are at the root of the epidemic of gender-based violence.
Robert W. Fieseler will speak at 10 a.m. on his book, “Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation,” about a 1973 New Orleans fire that claimed the lives of 32 people at the Up Stairs Lounge, the largest mass murder of gays until a 2016 nightclub attack in Orlando.
At 12:30 p.m. Japonica Brown-Saracino will discuss her book, “How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities,” which includes Portland. At 1:30 p.m. George Hodgman will discuss “Bettyville: A Memoir.” Marusya Bociurkiw, author of “Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter,” will speak at 2:30 p.m.
