Band of Thebes

The Best LGBT Books of 2011: 92 Authors Select Their Favorites

Click through for the year's queer finest...

Pro-Gay Straight Dems Derail Gay GOP Nominee for Jersey Bench

Curiouser and curiouser. This afternoon in a 7-6 vote, the NJ senate judiciary committee rejected Bruce Harris for the state's highest court, in part because America's first black gay Republican mayor said he would recuse himself from the court's contentious case over gay marriage. His detractors claim he cut this deal with antigay Governor Chris Christie in order to secure the nomination. Democrats are determined to win gay marriage for the garden state and don't want a judge who won't provide a crucial vote for it.

Read more here.

Unanimously Against DOMA

For the first time, a federal appellate court — immediately below the Supreme Court — ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional for prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriages that are valid in the states where they are performed. All three judges (appointed by Reagan, Bush, and Clinton) agreed, writing:

"Many Americans believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and most Americans live in states where that is the law today. One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage. Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest."

This case will surely go to the Supreme Court and almost certainly get there before Perry, meaning the Court's landmark gay marriage case will not be the one argued by the unbeatable team of Olson and Boies. Writing on the New Yorker's blog, Richard Socarides explains:

"...this is the result favored by the old guard of gay-rights litigators who prefer a more incremental strategy of Supreme Court review. (Although they will not like the language in today’s decision that suggests that states can decide on a case-by-case basis who can get married; but this is the risk of incrementalism.) In this case, a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would not require any kind of finding that there exists a hitherto-unrecognized constitutional right to same-sex marriage—only that the federal government must recognize marriages validly preformed in states that choose to do so."  

Gay Achilles Novel Wins Orange Prize

Tonight in London, American Madeline Miller won the 2012 Orange Prize for her debut novel The Song of Achilles [Kindle], narrated by his lover Patroclus. This ought to be the Band of Thebes-iest book of the decade; alas, I could never get in step with the novel's style. I agreed with gay classicist Dan Mendelsohn who thoughtfully, elegantly, swiftly speared and slaughtered it in the pages of the NYT Book Review:

"The real Achilles’ heel of this book is tone — one made disastrously worse by the author’s decision to metamorphose an ancient story of heroes into a modern tale of hormones....The problem reaches crisis proportions in the handling of the “love affair,” which begins with an embarrassing breathlessness and climaxes — sorry! — in the long-awaited and, it must be said, cringe-inducing consummation...Why is this so awful? Partly it’s the swoony soft-porn prose, but in the end it’s something much more significant, something that gets to the heart of why Miller’s book doesn’t swell or ripen into a meaningful engagement with the ancient literary tradition, as any serious attempt to appropriate the classics must." 

Orange Prize jury chair novelist Joanna Trollope does herself no favors by overstepping to drag in Homer's approval of Miller's efforts: “This is a more than worthy winner — original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her.” (Not to trump a Trollope, but Homer is where I live. He would hate it.) Mendelsohn says Mary Renault "would have found this book distasteful in the extreme."

If you're looking for a once in a lifetime brilliant reimagining of an ancient gay affair, read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian about the great emperor's love for the teen Antinous.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

How has Nick Hornby become the go-to literary screenwriter, now adapting Tóibín's Brooklyn for a film starring Rooney Mara? Either people really liked An Education or it's because Hornby's wife is again producing.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's true that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas.

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. Tóibín's current Lammy finalist, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent. Only two weeks until the publication of his essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle]. 

Gay Bestsellers

At some point, publishers (and lgbt authors) will have to stop saying it's impossible to market (or sell) queer work. Sunday's New York Times bestseller list has four gay books among their various top fives:

Gay gadfly and Bravo network exec vp Andy Cohen glitterbombs his way to #4 on the Nonfiction list with his very endearing memoir Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture [Kindle]. You have Andy to thank/blame for two ubiquitous series, Top Chef and The Real Housewives of... and now he hosts his own talk show.

Perennially popular gay shock memoirist Augusten Burroughs lands on the Advice list at #4 with his guide to facing life problems, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.[Kindle].

John Irving scores his tenth bestseller on the Fiction list, with In One Person at #5, about a bi stutterer who especially loves gay sex and trans sex. The book debuts four spots higher than Toni Morrison's Home and eleven places above Godfather prequel The Family Corleone.

After two weeks at #1 on the Graphic Books list, Alison Bechdel's wonderful Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama slips to #2, behind Batman: The Court of Owls, which some people would say also has a queer protagonist.

Although the content isn't gay, it's worth mentioning that Rachel Maddow's military book Drift spent four weeks at #1 on the Nonfiction list and now is #7.

To the naysayers who want to discredit each example above as cult of celebrity, I say: E. Lynn Harris.

Cannes Winners: Haneke, Mads, Mungiu

Michael Haneke again won the Palme d'Or tonight for Amour, his first film since taking Cannes' top prize in 2009 for The White Ribbon. Starring 81 year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant, 85 year-old Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabel Huppert, the new movie is the anti-Best Marigold Hotel. 

The jury gave hot Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen the award for best actor for The Hunt. The film is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, best known for his Dogma movie The Celebration, which might be a Danish cousin of the Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. This time the story follows a man falsely accused of molesting a girl.

The Romanian director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu's new film Beyond the Hills won two prizes, including best actress and best screenplay.

Eurovision 2012

The ugliest act at the 57th Eurovision Song Contest was neighbor Iran teasing host country Azerbaijan that the event would include a gay parade, and their indignant response trying to prove how much they hate homosexuals.

In their fear of flamboyant fanfare they might have been imagining Ireland's Jedward, the twin bros who say they are not gay, rather than Iceland's Jonsi, who has been out for many years. Tough call, but the gayest backup singers either were from Italy, wearing a full rainbow of colored shirts, or from France, going one better by going shirtless.

Sweden's Loreen won in a landslide for an unconvincing club song called Euphoria.

Grating Gatsby

In the novel, the shallowness of the age is balanced by the quality of the writing. Not so the trailer.

Nebula Winners: Walton, Ryman, Johnson, Gaiman

Following in the footsteps of Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman, Jo Walton has won the 2011 Nebula Award for best novel for Among Others [Kindle], which combines a classic coming of age story at an English boarding school with an epic mother - daughter power struggle fought with magic. It's Walton's ninth novel and the NYT called it "a wonder and a joy." 

Other category winners at the Nebulas, which honor outstanding work in speculative, fantasy, or science fiction, are:

Best novelette: "What We Found," by Geoff Ryman

Best novella: "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," by Kij Johnson

Best short story: "The Paper Menagerie," by Ken Liu

Best drama: Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife," by Neil Gaiman

E.O. Wilson on the Sociobiological Advantages of Homosexuality

Two-time Pulitzer winner E.O. Wilson, 82, discusses the intrinsic wrongs of homophobia and the sociobiological benefits of homosexuality in his new book The Social Conquest of Earth [Kindle]: 

"A second example of dogmatic ethics gone wrong for lack of knowledge is homophobia. The basal reasoning is much the same as for opposition to artificial contraception: sex not intended for reproduction must be an aberration and a sin. But an abundance of evidence points to the opposite. Committed homosexuality, with the preference appearing in childhood, is heritable. This means the trait is not always fixed, but part of the greater likelihood of a person's developing into a homosexual is prescribed by genes that differ from those that lead to heterosexuality. It has further turned out that heredity-influenced homosexuality occurs in populations worldwide too frequently to be due to mutations alone. Population geneticists use a rule of thumb to account for abundance at this level: if a trait cannot be due solely to random mutations, and yet it lowers or eliminates reproduction in those who have it, then the trait must be favored by natural selection working on a target of some other kind. For example, a low dose of homosexual-tending genes may give competitive advantages to a practicing heterosexual. Or, homosexuality may give advantages to the group by special talents, unusual qualities of personality, and the specialized roles and professions it generates. There is abundant evidence that such is the case in both preliterate and modern societies. Either way, societies are mistaken to disapprove of homosexuality because gays have different sexual preferences and reproduce less. Their presence should be valued instead for what they contribute constructively to human diversity. A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself." 

Camper of the Day

Over the years many Thebes readers have expressed admiration for my father, who has entered hospice care at home. Your good thoughts might be more meaningful now rather than later.

  

Gay Gardens (and the Men Who Love Them)

Readers charmed by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's 2009 memoir Our Life in Gardens [Kindle], about their thirty-two years at North Hill in Vermont, should look for Clyde 'Skip' Wachsberger's memoir Into the Garden with Charles [Kindle], covering twenty-eight years creating their sumptuous Adsworthy Garden in Orient, New York. They met through a personal ad when both men were over fifty and became inseparable. 

Chris Phillips highly recommends Skip's book, about which PW said:

"Wachsberger’s refreshing and heartfelt memoir invites the reader into a house, a garden, and two lives filled with affection and warmth. Sagging floorboards and rotting linoleum greet Wachsberger when, in 1983, he buys a 300-year-old house on Long Island. What will become a splendid garden is a “whole empty field around a clump of peonies.” The author, having “turned fifty without noticing how I had gotten there,” began “to grow around my loneliness the way a tree limb can grow through a chain-link fence, incorporating the sharp metal into its fiber without showing any outward signs of distress.” ... When Clyde met Charles, he found the “best friend who was also an affectionate lover, a friend who shared my deepest yearning to be someone special for someone special” he had been looking for. Together they form a union, produce a book (Of Leaf and Flower), and nurture a noteworthy garden. With a keen ear and eye for the anecdotal, Wachsberger sketches beautifully lucid picture in words, and his illustrative paintings add both beauty and emotional content to this candidly romantic memoir." 

Winterrowd died in September 2010,  Wachsberger died of prostate cancer in November 2011.

Support DER SAMURAI by Till Kleinert

When the film gods play fair, all the world's cineastes will celebrate Till Kleinert. His magnificent 2008 medium-length film Cowboy was a tremendous highpoint of 2008. Now he's in pre-production on his first feature, DER SAMURAI, and you can get in on the bragging rights by donating $10, $25, $40, $100, or more to help finance the film. If you care at all about nurturing queer art, please consider supporting this visionary writer/director. Click to indiegogo. 

Born May 22: Paul Winfield

After three consecutive years of winning best actor at Speech and Drama Teachers Association Drama Festival during high school in Los Angeles, Paul Winfield received an offer of a scholarship to Yale. It was 1959 and he turned it down. Nine years later he played Diahann Carroll's boyfriend on the groundbreaking tv series Julia. In 1972, he earned a best actor Oscar nomination for his starring role in Sounder, and lived with his co-star Cicely Tyson for a year and a half. After that, he split for San Francisco where he met Charles Gillan Jr., an architect and set designer on "Married … With Children," "Who's the Boss?" "Mad About You" and "The Nanny." They stayed together for 30 years. Returning to LA, he again played opposite Cicely Tyson in A Hero Ain't Nothin But A Sandwich and yet again when he starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in the miniseries King, for which he and she were both nominated for Emmys. In the 80s and 90s he appeared in twenty-five films including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator, Presumed Innocent, Dennis the Menace, and Mars Attacks! Although open in his social life, he was closeted in public, yet played gay characters in Mike's Murder and Relax... It's Just Sex. Winfield appeared in recurring story arcs on L.A. Law, Touched by an Angel, and Picket Fences, for which he won an Emmy in 1995. Suffering from diabetes, he died of a heart attack at 64 in 2004, two years after his partner.

(AP photo via)

NAACP, Majority of Latino Americans Support Gay Marriage

Over the weekend in a "near-unanimous" vote, the NAACP endorsed same-sex marriage. Mr. Jealous, the president and CEO of the 103-year-old organization, said, "Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people."

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 54% of Hispanic voters support same-sex marriage. At the time, that was one percentage point higher than the support from the general population.

Another new supporter of gay marriage is 50 Cent. 

Snooki and JWoww have wanted to go to queer wedding for, like, forever, right?

Snooki's all, "I have a lot of friends who are gay. They need to be equal because they are amazing friends."

JWoww is insane smart! She told MTV, "I'm glad that he did it — better late than never...We just need the laws to change — it's 2012. I want to see my best friend get married, and I want to see everyone in every state be able to get married. It's their choice. It's not affecting our lives. So let them be equal. We want them to be able to experience life, and if they want to be miserable and married, let them be miserable and married like us."

A tribune wire story reports, "Almost two weeks after Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, polls provide some measure of the impact - zero."