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The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp-Art Café

St Sukie de la Croix

“…you will never look at a head of lettuce the same way again”

— Keith John Glaeske, Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews

$14.95

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Released:
June 20, 2020
Pages:
141
Formats Available:
Paperback •Ebook
Paperback:
978-1-7341464-4-8
Ebook:
979-8-223900-90-0

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Emma Lazarus Never Mentioned the Vampires

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” ~ Poem on the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus

Indeed, waves of wretched refuse did wash up on America’s shore: the Irish fled the Emerald Isle to escape the potato famine; Jews escaped marauding Cossacks and Russian pogroms; Italian anarchists escaped persecution; the Dutch fled the horror of wearing clogs and growing tulips, and British vampires escaped the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In 1897, in London, Archibald Constable and Co. published Dracula by the Irish author Bram Stoker. The book portrayed vampires in an unsympathetic light, to say the least. Fearing pogroms, British vampires packed their bags and fled to America, landing at the sweaty, buzzing beehive of Ellis Island.

In 1924, in Chicago, vampires gather at the Vamp-Art Café in Towertown and share stories.

Praise for The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp-Art Café

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About the Author

St Sukie de la Croix has been a social commentator and researcher on Chicago’s LGBT history for three decades. He has published oral-history interviews; lectured; conducted historical tours; documented LGBT life through columns, photographs, humor features, and fiction; and written the book Chicago Whispers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) on local LGBT history. St Sukie de la Croix, the man the Chicago Sun-Times described as “the gay Studs Terkel,” came to Chicago from his native Bath, England, in 1991. He has had columns in local publications and online news and entertainment sources, including Chicago Free Press, Gay Chicago, Nightlines/Nightspots, Outlines, Blacklines, Windy City Times, and GoPride.com, as well as numerous others outside the city. In 2008, he served as a historical consultant and an on-screen interviewee for the WTTW television documentary “Out & Proud in Chicago.” In 2005 and 2006 he had two of his plays, “A White Light in God’s Choir” and “Two Weeks in a Bus Station with an Iguana,” performed by Chicago’s Irreverence Dance & Theatre Company. A popular and engaging lecturer, he has spoken at a range of venues, from Chubb Insurance to Boeing and from Horizons Gay Youth Services to the Chicago Area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. His crowning achievement came in 2012 when the University of Wisconsin published his in-depth, vibrant record of LGBT Chicagoans, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. With a foreword by noted historian John D’Emilio, the book received glowing reviews and cemented de la Croix’s deserved position as a top-ranking historian and leader. In 2012, de la Croix was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Two years later he moved to Cathedral City, California, and in 2017 published The Blue Spong and the Flight from Mediocrity, a novel set in 1924 Chicago, followed by The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp Art Café in 2020. In 2018 he published The Memoir of a Groucho Marxist, a work about growing up Gay in Great Britain, and in 2019, Out of the Underground: Homosexuals, the Radical Press and the Rise and Fall of the Gay Liberation Front. Also in 2019 he published St Sukie’s Strange Garden of Woodland Creatures with celebrated illustrator Roy Alton Wald. It was in 2019 that St Sukie de la Croix and Owen Keehnen launched their Tell Me About It Project, which led to the 2019 publication of Tell Me About It, Tell Me About It 2, and in 2020, Tell Me About It 3. In 2020, St Sukie’s latest work of fictionThe Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp-Arts Café, the second book in the popular Spong Series, was published. He is also the author of the popular comic Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, which follows the hysterical adventures of Brian & Stéphane, a retired gay couple. The series includes Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, God’s Waiting Room, and Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Strange Case of Donna Reed’s Missing Wig, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Peculiar Case of the Follies Dancer, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Lady in Gray & The Bessie Mae Diamond, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Great New Orleans Powder Puff Caper, and Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Hunt fo the Hairdo Killer,

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Praise

Praise for The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp-Art Café

“Regardless of whether you are a vampire purist or not, these stories will entertain you, while they titillate you with their strangeness, provoke you with their ideas on the nature of art or immortality, or amuse you with their unusual historical details. Certainly you will never look at a head of lettuce the same way again.”

—Keith John Glaeske, Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews