LOS ANGELES, CA — The landmark author of some of the most popular gay fiction of modern time has turned her pen to the real world with what one prominent sports journalist has called "a fascinating array of often overlooked sports stories... from jockeys, skaters, and boxers to early Olympics gender testing."
Internationally celebrated novelist, Patricia Nell Warren, is publishing her first nonfiction book titled The Lavender Locker Room, 3000 Years of Great Athletes Whose Sexual Orientation Was Different, scheduled for release in November.
Warren'spast works, including The Front Runner, Harlan's Race, Billy's Boy, The Wild Man, and One Is The Sun, represent a distinguished literary career of four decades and are considered essential inventory by booksellers who carry gay fiction.
Warren's latest offering is an anthology of historical essays previously featured on OutSports.com which chronicle the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender athletes over the past three millennia. Among the noteworthy sports figures featured in The Lavender Locker Room are golfer Babe Didrikson, boxer Wilhelm von Homburg, pilot Amelia Earhart, downhill skier Erik Schinegger, jockey John Damien, and 13th century jouster Jeanne la Pucelle, better known as Joan of Arc.
"These authentic, in-depth profiles span many countries and run the sexuality gamut," states Ms. Warren, "focusing both on the compelling personal stories of these remarkable athletes and on their lasting contributions to sport itself."
The Lavender Locker Room is also Warren's first anthology and features athletes from the Trojan War in 1000 B.C. to just after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, representing a myriad of sports including alpine skiing, ballooning, baseball, boxing, dressage, fencing, football, horse racing, tennis, swimming, and sport aviation.
"My point in telling these stories is that the presence of athletes with different sexualities in sport is not something that started when football player David Kopay came out in 1975. It has been going on for many centuries," Warren declares.
Warren, who has written eight novels and two books of poetry, has attracted an estimated twenty million readers worldwide with subjects which range from gay life to Native American spirituality. However, The Lavender Locker Room is Warren's first book of nonfiction and is scheduled to arrive in bookstores nationwide by November 1st.
Warren's most celebrated work, The Front Runner, about the relationship between an ex-Marine track coach and his male athlete, was the first novel with openly gay characters to make the New York Times Bestseller List, has sold an estimated ten million copies in ten languages, and is considered by many to be the most influential gay novel of the 20th century.