demonstration against
California Proposition 8. Upon graduating, Towle was awarded the 1989 W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts from
Vassar College. He also received a
Wallace Stegner graduate fellowship from 1989 to 1991 from
Stanford University, and two writing fellowships, one in poetry and one in fiction, from the
Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, Massachusetts. While in Provincetown he produced poetry, and worked as a pool boy and a bartender at
The Boatslip resort. After moving to New York in 1992, he became a bartender and later a manager at the 1990s Manhattan gay bar
Splash. From 1998 to 2002, Towle served as the
editor in chief of
Genre magazine, and editor at large for
The Out Traveler, an American gay travel quarterly. Towle's poetry appeared in
The Yale Review (May 1991),
Ploughshares (Winter 1992–93),
The Paris Review in 2000, and in
Poetry Magazine (July 1988, November 1988, February 1991, May 1997, and July 1999). Towle founded the website
Towleroad in 2003 and left in 2021 to focus full time on a career in visual art. In June 2024, Towle exhibited new paintings at Provincetown Commons in
Provincetown,
Massachusetts, alongside artists Trevor Mikula and Josh Wilmoth. ==See also==