Donald Olson was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and studied English and German Literature at the University of Minnesota. He began writing as a teenager and completed his first novel when he was 18—but it was not published for another 20 years. In his wide-ranging, international career as a writer he has published seven novels, had his plays produced in Europe and the U.S., authored dozens of travel guides, and penned two West Coast garden-tour books illustrated with his photographs. Donald splits his time between Manhattan and Portland, Oregon.
Early Work
Donald completed several novels in the 1970s and worked at various jobs in order to travel as often as possible to Europe. In 1980 Christopher Street, a gay literary magazine, published one of Donald’s short stories and introduced him to Pat Loud of “An American Family,” the first reality TV show. Pat became Donald’s first agent and urged him to write something “scary and fun.” The result was The Secrets of Mabel Eastlake, his first published novel and the first trans gay thriller ever written. Based on an old Hollywood legend, Mabel Eastlake garnered attention in the U.S. and U.K. and led to the publication of Paradise Gardens, a novel that he had completed in London several years earlier. That, in turn, led to the publication of A Movie, the experimental novel he had completed at age 18. The writer and bon vivant Quentin Crisp reviewed and lent his witty imprimatur to Donald’s first published novels, and in 2020 Lume Books in London published a new eBook edition of The Secrets of Mabel Eastlake. Donald’s first play, Blood, was produced off-off Broadway in 1986 and dealt with the then-unheard-of subject of gay parenting.
Life with Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde
Increasingly interested in gay history, and the social ramifications of the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, Donald spent five years researching and writing about the short, tumultuous life of the 19th-century English artist Aubrey Beardsley. The play Beardsley, about the devastating relationship between Beardsley and Wilde, was produced in 1987 by the English-speaking Artists Repertory Theatre at the Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam’s main theater. It was subsequently produced in Rotterdam and London.
The play was followed by the novel The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley. Lavishly illustrated with Donald’s selection of Beardsley drawings and historical photographs, the novel was published by Transworld/Bantam Press in the U.K. in 1993. Francis King, writing in The Spectator, called it “enthralling.” In 2020, London-based Lume Books published a newly revised eBook edition of The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley with all of its original illustrations. You can read more about The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley under the Fiction tab in the menu above.
Writing About What No One Would Write About
After spending five years in the 19th-century, Donald felt it was important, as an artist, to return to the present and write about contemporary life and issues. Gays in Oregon had been battling repressive anti-gay rights measures for years, and yet no one had ever written about these battles from a gay perspective. Donald felt these ongoing battles were an essential and defining part of gay cultural history and identity that were being entirely ignored by the mainstream media. Queer Corners, set in a fictional gay neighborhood in Portland, Oregon during a violently homophobic anti-gay rights battle, was turned down by several publishers for being “too political.” It was finally taken on by BridgeCity Books in Portland and published in 1999. A new eBook edition of Queer Corners was published in 2020 by Lume Books in London. You can read more about Queer Corners under the Fiction tab in the menu above.
The Play's The Thing!
Between his travel-writing jobs, Donald continued to write plays and novels. His comic play Tourists was produced twice in Portland. The Garden Plays, also produced in Portland, takes place in two different gardens at two different crisis points inhibitory: Rome in 408 A.D., when the barbarians are about to invade, and Trump-era New York, when a different kind of barbarian has invaded. Oregon Ghosts, for which Donald also wrote the music, was a sell-out show at Lakewood Theater; it was based on three legendary Oregon ghosts he had heard about (or actually heard, in one case) during his travel-guide research trips through Oregon.
Swan Adamson Steps In
For his next three novels, Donald used the name of his Swedish great-grandfather, Swan Adamson, as a nom de plume. My Three Husbands, a comic novel about two rather conventional gay dads and their very unconventional daughter, Venus Gilroy, was the first Swan Adamson novel. My Three Husbands was later published in the U.K., and subsequently translated into French and Russian. In the U.S., it was followed by a sequel, Confessions of a Pregnant Princess. But the U.K. publishers wanted a follow-up novel of their own, so Donald wrote an alternative sequel called Memoirs Are Made of This. His essay Confessions of a Faux Pa was published in the nonfiction anthology What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding on, and Letting Go of Their Daughters.
Garden GUIDEs and GARDEN TALKS
A passionate gardener and garden lover, Donald spent two years researching, writing and photographing his book The Pacific Northwest Garden Tour, a guide to the 60 best public gardens in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. Named by Library Journal as “one of the best research guides of 2014,” the PNGT garnered great reviews and led to Donald’s second book for Timber Press, The California Garden Tour, a guide to the 50 best gardens in the Golden State. Both guides are illustrated with Donald evocative photographs. The two garden-tour books led to many speaking engagements at venues such as Modernism Week in Palm Springs, Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle, San Francisco Botanical Garden, Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, Portland Garden Club, and Seattle-Tacoma Garden Club. In 2021, Donald presented via Zoom his illustrated talk “My Gotham Garden - The Joys and Challenges of Creating a Garden in Manhattan” to the Hardy Plant Society of Oregon. For a list of Donald’s garden talks, click on the Speaking/Presentations tab in the menu; to read more about his garden-tour books, click on the Garden tab.
Oscar & walt, new e-books, a new musical
In 2019, Donald’s play Oscar & Walt won the “Best Full-length Play” award from the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights/City of West Hollywood Pride Reading Festival. The play, about a little-known 1882 meeting between literary giants Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, had staged readings in West Hollywood, San Francisco and at the National Arts Club in New York. In October, 2019, the play premiered in Rome with the English Theatre of Rome , and in October 2021, the Kinetic Theatre Company presented the U.S. premiere in Pittsburgh. An all-star reading of Oscar & Walt is available on Youtube as part of the 2020 New Works Virtual Festival. (Read more about Oscar & Walt by clicking the Oscar & Walt tab under Theatre.) During the Covid lockdown year of 2020, Donald revised three of his novels—The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley, The Secrets of Mabel Eastlake, and Queer Corners—and finished a new collection of short stories, The Gravedigger’s Daughter - Ghost Stories & Other Otherworldly Tales, for publication as eBooks. His new musical, TRANSFORMATION - The Christine Jorgensen Show, will have its first staged performance at the National Arts Club in March, 2022, and his new play, TRANSITION - The Christine Jorgensen Collection, will have its first staged reading in November 2022 with Transformation theatre in Washington, D.C. You can read more about all these works on the Welcome page or by clicking on the Theatre and Fiction tabs in the menu.