Authors Kiss with Sara Troy and her guest Patrick E. Horrigan, on air from June 20th
Award-winning author Patrick E. Horrigan on creating complex LGBTQ+ characters amidst the backdrop of the AIDS-ravaged 1980s and the Trump-challenged 2010s, Kirkus Reviews calls his latest historical fiction novel American Scholar, “A haunting, complex look at love, gay history, and the passage of time.” The book is the winner of the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction.
Patrick will talk about how he created an emotional story that brews amidst the backdrop of political polarization in today’s America, and reflections on the tumultuous days of AIDS in the late 1980s.
- The challenges of fictionalizing elements of real-life events and people, balancing the raw truth with fictional license to enlighten, entertain, inform, and inspire others
- The complexity of story in the lives of the LGBT community – both in the AIDS-ravaged 1980s and the Trump-challenged 2010s
- The universal themes of love, memory and self-discovery and how we all struggle with confronting our true selves
- Why each of his books’ narratives revolve around some type of art medium
- Why his books offer “French endings,” the way French films often end abruptly, with no resolution or neatness to the story, where characters are left in limbo, often suffering, like life itself
- Why he tries to create LGBTQ+ characters that are complex and often ambivalent — why he avoids uplifting and overly-idealized characters
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Patrick E. Horrigan is an award-winning novelist, professor, essayist, and playwright. He is the author of the novel, Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGB’TQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz, Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts).
His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies, the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leáñez) the solo show You Are Confused! He has written artists’ catalogue essays for Thion’s Limi-TATE: Drawings of Life and Dreams (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol’s Loss of Faith (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York).
His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns and Christopher R. Smit’s Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability. The winner of Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, Horrigan taught literature for 25 years at LIU Brooklyn. He received his B.A. from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University.
He and his husband are the hosts of a recurring variety show called “Actors with Accents,” which they have staged periodically in New York’s Lower East Side for the past decade. They give artists of color and artists with accents an opportunity to perform things they might not have the chance to do in the mainstream art world. Horrigan is currently in training to become a tour guide at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His hobbies and interests include: piano, opera, arts, classical music, dance, cooking, and traveling.
Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, he now resides in Manhattan.
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