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Alvin Orloff

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Alvin Orloff

Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Author


Born
in Los Angeles, The United States
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Member Since
April 2007


Alvin Orloff began writing in 1977 as the teenage lyricist for The Blowdryers, an early San Francisco Punk band. He spent the 1980s dabbling in avant garde theater, underground cabaret, performance art, and nightclub DJing before remembering all he ever wanted to be was a writer. His memoir, "Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 - 1997," an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking coming-of-age-story set during a time when youthful exuberance and flippancy collided with the deadly seriousness of homophobia and AIDS, was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in gay memoir. He is also the author of four novels: I Married an Earthling, Gutter Boys, Why Aren't You Smiling? and most recently, Vulgarian Rhapsody. ...more

Average rating: 4.03 · 619 ratings · 126 reviews · 8 distinct works â€� Similar authors
Pills, Thrills, Chills, and...

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3.73 avg rating — 207 ratings — published 2004 — 3 editions
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Disasterama!: Adventures in...

4.34 avg rating — 175 ratings — published 2019 — 2 editions
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The Unsinkable Bambi Lake

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4.30 avg rating — 53 ratings — published 1996 — 4 editions
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Vulgarian Rhapsody

3.69 avg rating — 59 ratings6 editions
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I Married An Earthling: A N...

3.93 avg rating — 45 ratings — published 2000 — 2 editions
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Gutterboys

4.28 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2004 — 2 editions
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Why Aren't You Smiling?

4.18 avg rating — 40 ratings — published 2011 — 6 editions
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[Why Aren't You Smiling?] [...

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More books by Alvin Orloff…

I was not prepared for the weirdness!

The English eccentric, Quentin Crisp, once said that, "Only a lie is boring," and I believe that truer words were ne'er spoke. I wanted my memoir, "Disasterama!" to be exciting, so I told the truth about my louche and feckless youth as a club kid, hustler, and somewhat delusional cultural activist. When, after 56 rejections, it was accepted by Three Rooms Press for publication in the fall of '19, Read more of this blog post »
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Published on June 17, 2019 11:35 Tags: aids, gay, memoir

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Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher
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This reads like a bunch of material that wasn't quite good enough to make it into Wishful Drinking (which I loved!) and it's hellaciously repetitious to boot. There's a bit of fun celebrity gossip concerning her family, Liz Taylor, and Michael Jackso ...more
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An Assassin in Utopia by Susan Wels
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As many disappointed reviewers have pointed out, this book is tightly focused on neither the sex cult nor the crime mentioned in the subtitle. If you're willing to accept this as a diverting romp through the insanity of mid-19th century America, thou ...more
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The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood
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This epistolary novel is the unflinching character study of a deeply damaged woman. The stepmom narrator/protagonist is not only selfish but self-loathing and painfully self-aware. Her venom is so extreme it borders on the comic and at first one almo ...more
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Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So
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So's essays are a mixed bag: cynical, big-hearted, perceptive, pretentious, stylish, and - it must be said - a bit sophomoric. The fragments from So's unfinished novel exhibit the same qualities, but to better effect. Had he completed it, Straight Ou ...more
Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So
"I was worried this would be filled with junk salvaged from Veasna So's desktop after his sudden death, but it turns out this writer is as good as I thought he was after reading Afterparties. A substantial percentage of this is pieces of what I assume" Read more of this review »
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At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
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Here and there Kincaid's prose illuminates connections and moods in a way that's quite unique and brilliant. Alas, she also wanders into realms of pure physical description as boring as listening to your boring coworker's boring dreams. The very firs ...more
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Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
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Florid, descriptive prose makes this feminist reclaiming of a mistreated character from Jane Eyre read like a lost classic of romanticism. Rhys displays a lot of keen insight into her characters' psyches and shines a light on the the monstrous workin ...more
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Wharton's stories are quite varied. They range in tone from satiric to tragic and her subjects range from gilded age social dynamics, to family drama, to l'amour. Yet they're all full of keen psychological insights which (and this is what makes her a ...more
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A Low Life in High Heels by Holly Woodlawn
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Woodlawn led a wild life on the wildest fringes of midcentury America's wild bohemia. Expect lots of drugs, drag, avant garde theater, sexual promiscuity, kinky cabaret, and cocktails, cocktails, cocktails! Her escapades would be fun enough to read a ...more
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Young Mungo by Douglas   Stuart
Young Mungo
by Douglas Stuart (Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ Author)
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Quotes by Alvin Orloff  (?)
Quotes are added by the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ community and are not verified by Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ.

“Colin smirks, "The only things I have to do are stay queer and die.”
Alvin Orloff, Gutterboys

“Reagan's going to mess everything up, cutting taxes for the wealthy and getting rid of the safety net and all that. The rich and the poor won't be able to mix socially. The rich will be afraid of getting ripped off or asked for money and the poor won't be able to afford to hang out in the same places anyway. Society's going to be divided by class and instead of expressing themselves, people are going to spend all their time advertising their status. It'll be shallow, like the Eisenhower era. Parties will suck.”
Alvin Orloff, Gutterboys

“Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul--bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror--is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.”
Alvin Orloff, Disasterama!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997

“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”
Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascismâ€� is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
George Orwell

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
H.P. Lovecraft

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”
Joanna Russ, The Female Man

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
Oscar Wilde

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message 2: by Alvin

Alvin Hi Debbie,

Wow, great to meet you!

Alvin


Debbie "DJ" Hi Alvin, thanks for the add. I had no idea you wrote "Why Aren't You Smiling?," it's already on my TBR list!


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