Win Extraordinary Hearts by Nicholas F Benton!
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Larry Kramer Offers Ringing Endorsement To Benton's 'Extraordinary Hearts'
Tony and Emmy Award Winning playwright and legendary gay activist Larry Kramer has issued a ringing endorsement of Nicholas Benton's book of 100 collected news column-length essays, "Extraordinary Hearts: Reclaiming Gay Sensibility's Central Role in the Progress of Civilization."
Kramer, most recently the subject of an HBO documentary now airing, entitled, "Larry Kramer in Love and Anger," said of Benton's book, "A vital moral book about who we are and who we should be. I admire it and its author enormously."
Kramer, 80, has enjoyed a revival of interest and notoriety since his 1985 play, "A Normal Heart," was revived on Broadway in 2010 and subsequently made into an Emmy Award winning HBO film by the same name. He's just published his own book, "The American People: Volume 1, The Search for My Heart," with Volume 2 on the way, and the current HBO documentary focuses on his gay activism, especially in forming the "Act Up" organization to draw attention to the need for more government involvement in finding a treatment for AIDS.
Nicholas Benton is also a "gay activist pioneer," a seminarian who co-founded the Berkeley, Calif., chapter of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, in the year after the Stonewall Riots. For 25 years now, he has been the owner and editor of a Washington, D.C.-area general interest weekly newspaper, and he penned 100 weekly columns in the D.C.-based gay magazine, Metro Weekly, from 2010 to 2012. These are compiled in his "Extraordinary Hearts" book, published by the Lethe Press. In 2014, Benton was honored by the D.C. Gay Pride committee as a "Gay Pride Hero."
"I consider it an phenomenal honor to have my book be so enthusiastically supported by Larry Kramer, because the most important about him is his unyielding commitment to the truth," Benton said. "I am a great admirer of him and what he has accomplished. His activism in the 1980s and 1990s has been acknowledged by the National Institutes of Health establishment as responsible for achieving breakthroughs in AIDS research and saving countless thousands of lives as a result."
Other strong endorsements of Benton's book have come from prominent LGBT figures such as portrait artist Don Bachardy, figure skater Johnny Weir and Washington Blade feature editor Joey DiGuglielmo, who authored the book's Forward.
Benton's "Extraordinary Hearts" is on sale now on Amazon and other locations in hard copy and electronically. The author is available for interviews, and can be reached by email at nfbenton@aol.com, through his website at NFBenton.com, or by phone at 703-307-4637.
