Published in 1990, In My Father’s Car by George Stambolian is one of the first, if not the first [*], short stories written about and by a gay Armenian-American.
Stambolian published the story in his Men on Men: Best New Fiction series. The third installment of the series, which includes In My Father’s Car, earned Stambolian a LAMDA Literary Award.
He was an American educator, writer, and editor of Armenian descent. Stambolian was a prominent leader in the gay literary movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
Stambolian was a professor of French at Wellesley College from 1966 until his retirement in 1991. He wrote and edited Twentieth Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée, and Homosexualities and French Literature.
As for me, the evidence is clear–I am beginning to look like my father. And now that he is dying, my metamorphosis has accelerated. He seems to be hurling his traits at me in a mad effort to guarantee their survival, or something in me is sucking them from him against his will.
In My Father’s Car, George Stambolian
Stambolian’s anthologies brought together the best gay fiction from the 1980s. The series highlighted his role as a leader of gay literature in the United States. He published articles and interviews in The Advocate, New York Native, and Christopher Street. He also wrote a regular autobiographical column for the New York Native.
The publication Male Fantasies/Gay Realities was a collection of interviews Stambolian conducted with ten gay men. He was a professor of French Literature and Theatre at Wellesley from 1966 up until his death in 1991. He died of HIV/AIDs at 54 years old.
The novelist Armistead Maupin created a character based on Stambolian in his 1992 novel Maybe the Moon.
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ISBN: 978-0452265141. Published by Plume, the Penguin Group.
