Band of Thebes

Highly Recommended: Mental Monday

If you're anywhere near New York, cancel your plans for Monday night and go hear Eddie Sarfaty read from his very funny and moving brand new book, MENTAL. The funny, you'd expect, because he's a standup comic. Yet it turns out he's also a born writer. The book is great. (I'll be writing about it more next week.) Until then, buy it, and go see him at 7:00 on Monday, July 13 at the B&N on Broadway & 82nd St.

Once again, kudos to Lou Pizzitola who organizes many of the very best readings in New York for this branch of B&N.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Farley Granger, Tab Hunter: Was any heartthrob movie star straight in the conservative 1950s? Hunter and Perkins dated each other for several years while the press reported phony stories that Hunter was involved with Debbie Reynolds or Natalie Wood. Born Arthur Kelm, he changed his name made more than fifty movies; his triumphs were Damn Yankees, Lafayette Escadrille, and That Kind of Woman. He recorded a pop song, Young Love, which was the #1 hit in the U.S. for a month in 1957, and made many subsequent albums. He had a short-lived television show and a famous flop on Broadway, co-starring with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which closed after five performances. Smaller movies followed. In the 1980s he had a comeback, starring twice with Divine, first in Polyester, then in Lust in the Dust, which he co-produced with Allan Glaser. Hunter did not come out until September 2003, when at 72, he sold a book proposal for a memoir that would discuss his life candidly. Tab Hunter Confidential appeared in 2005 and revealed he and his producer Allan Glaser have been romantic partners for twenty-five years. They live in Montecito.

For ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Vito Russo toured the country giving what today would be a PowerPoint presentation about the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in the media. His devastating book on the subject, The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, was years ahead of its time and remains essential reading today. The book was made into a documentary in 1996, six years after his death from aids. Russo’s sharp critique of the industry led him to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It is hard to imagine the principled visionary connected to today’s GLAAD, which endorsed such overblown caricature-fests as Boat Trip and, yesterday, praised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry despite the movie’s continual use of “stereotypes and slurs” according to Damon Romine, GLAAD’s director of entertainment media.

SCLC Trying To Oust L.A. Chapter President for Supporting Gay Marriage

The Southern Christian Leadership Council, the 1957 civil rights organization co-founded by Martin Luther King Jr., is attempting to remove the current president of its Los Angeles chapter for supporting gay marriage. The Rev. Eric P. Lee told the NYT that his campaigning against Prop 8

“created tension in my life I had never experienced with black clergy. But it was clear to me that any time you deny one group of people the same right that other groups have that is a clear violation of civil rights and I have to speak up on that.”

He also said, of the national organization's opposition to gay marriage, “Dr. King would be turning over in his grave right now.”

Rev. Lee criticized gay leaders against Prop 8 for not reaching out to the black community. In fact, he may be giving them too much credit in saying, “The failure of the campaign was to presume that African-Americans would see this as a civil rights issue.”

July 10: Marcel Proust, Neil Tennant

 
Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences, the majority of which are negative. One rationale for this dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he himself was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now permanently on display in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.

Oh, Neil, even though you're 55, and went to the same grammar school as Sting (two years behind him), and planned your fall tour of America exactly when I can't go. It's still .

Day Trip to Seldovia, Alaska, Population 286

 
Founded before 1820 by Russian fur traders, Seldovia was a major port in south central Alaska until the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 sank the boardwalk below sea level and destroyed the town. (The immensity of that earthquake often eludes people from the lower 48; in oversimplified terms, an area in Alaska roughly the size of California collapsed six feet.) Today, Seldovia is a jumping off point for hiking trails and kayaking in heavily wooded coves, remarkable for having escaped the bark beetle blight. One terrific, easy trail is called the Otterbahn, a couple miles through forests, across a boardwalk over marshland, and onto a rocky beach where four large otters were swimming.

Born July 9: David Hockney

Don’t let his placid English face fool you: David Hockney's art has been one revolution after another. However beautiful, everything he’s done upends convention or expectation. As early as 1959-60 and 1961, with Erection and the Whitman-titled We Two Boys Together Clinging, he was boldly painting gay love. Once he saw southern California, he began to use color in extraordinarily startling ways. He painted gay couples, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy above, exactly as he depicted straight couples, in 1968, when the rest of the world certainly didn't see them that way. His photomontages, or “joiners” primarily from 1970-1986, virtually reinvented how one could use a polaroid. He created wild stage sets for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Met. And, in 2001, he proposed a shattering theory that the Old Masters did not paint freehand so much as follow images projected onto their canvas via camera obscura techniques. (This might solve the mystery of why details at the edges of their paintings are inexplicably blurry or out of focus.) Thirty years after his iconic A Bigger Splash, Hockney created A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 rectangular paintings fitted together to form one giant picture. Even more recent work has included painted installations illuminated with black light, as at the Smithsonian American Art  Museum. Jack Hazan’s documentary captures every angle of Hockney's intense romance with Peter Schlesinger, who appears nude in his most famous pool pictures. To celebrate his 70th birthday in 2007, Hockney showed his recent paintings of his native Yorskhire, like the one above, at the Tate Britain in London.

Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatín

Q: When is seventy-two pages a novel?

A: When the author's subject is wasting away.

Ten years ago in Mexico, Mario Bellatín wrote Beauty Salon about a transvestite hosting and nursing gay men through death from an aids-like disease. When the book was published in France in 2000, it was nominated for the Prix Medicis etranger (losing to Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje). Its reception in his native land was even more dramatic according to Francisco Goldman, who says:

"When this disquieting novella appeared, told in a spare poetic language that seemed at once familiar and hauntingly strange, Mexican (and even Latin American) literature changed. Many readers sensed that here, at last, was a writer who truly spoke for them, of their secrets and secret selves and submerged dreams, in a voice they hadn't realized could actually find expression, much less appear in a book. Since then Mario Bellatín's influence and prestige have grown with each subsequent book, all of them marvels, like gifts from the future."

So let's take a break from the destructive received wisdom about Latin America's pervasive homophobia.

Publishers Weekly also praised the work in its first English translation, just published by City Lights.

"An extremely slender, sad tale by Bellatín recounts a gay man's reflections on the waning days of sexual excess and the specter of death wrought by AIDS, though here AIDS is a mysterious, nameless plague. Formerly a stylist in a beauty salon in an unnamed city, the narrator, a transvestite, has now transformed the salon into the Terminal, “where people who have nowhere to die end their days.” The Terminal has become a kind of hospice for dying gay men, the hair dryers and armchairs sold to buy cots and a cooker, the mirrors removed to avoid “multiplying the suffering.” The manager keeps exotic fish in aquariums, which he keenly observes as an allegory of what's happening in the larger world: as symptoms of the sickness become apparent on his own body, he notices a fungus growing on the angelfish that fatally infects the others. The narrator's brutal reasoning renders Bellatín's tale an unflinching allegory on death."

It sounds as though 1) we should all give it a try, 2) Bellatín should be published by FSG like Bolaño, and 3) it should have entrancing / spooky aquarium fish on the cover rather than the chairs and hairdryers from Queen Latifah's Beauty Shop.

Born July 7: George Cukor

You might make the case that Katharine Hepburn owed her career to George Cukor. He gave Hepburn her first movie role in A Bill of Divorcement, then cast her as Jo in Little Women, then as Sylvia Scarlett. Their last collaboration was 47 years after their first, when Cukor directed her in The Corn Is Green for television. He famously paired her with Cary Grant in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and perfected the Hepburn - Tracy subgenre with Adam's Rib and, less so, with Pat and Mike. According to William J. Mann's biography Kate, she was also indebted to Cukor for the way he perpetuated the fabled Hepburn - Tracy offscreen romance, which Mann says was fabricated to mask the never married star's lesbian affairs. Cukor was much more open in his own gay pursuits, hosting weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties where Hollywood's brightest mingled with aspiring actors and rough trade. Depending which version you choose, Cukor's being fired from Gone with the Wind after two years of prep and three weeks of filming was either because Clark Gable refused to be directed by a "fairy" or because Gable was terrified Cukor knew about his own past gay relationships. Nevertheless, even after Victor Flemming took over, Cukor continued to coach Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles. As for his way with male actors, no director has coaxed more performances winning the Oscar for Best Actor than did Cukor. Among his other great achievements are Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Women, Gaslight, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, It Should Happen to You, Travels with my Aunt and My Fair Lady, for which he won an Oscar.

London: Gay Icons, Gay Pride, Gay Schism

Two landmark moments two days apart: On Thursday, the National Portrait Gallery in London opened their massive exhibition, Gay Icons, showing sixty portraits, six each selected by ten famous lgbt people. It is the museum's first show dedicated to celebrating the contributions of queer folk, though some of the icons are straight, such as three princesses one-name sensations: Diana, Kylie, Mandela.  (The selectors are nine Britons and Billie Jean King; no idea why.) What's important about this show is that it incorporates the continuum. While honoring gay pioneers like Walt Whitman and Alan Turing, it does not abandon us to the past, but brings gay visibility seamlessly from then to now, irrefutably always part of the current culture.

If you'll be in London before October 18, go. If not, check out the Guardian's slideshow of fifteen chosen images or watch the Telegraph's video review of the exhibit, which is fun for two reasons: You get to see how the icons are hung and you get to hear the rawther miserable art critic bemoan the public's "bottomless appetite" for celebrity pictures and then dismiss the entire show as "opportunistic" and "craven." Worst of all, he knows it will "popular."

Speaking of popular, on Saturday, Sarah Brown, wife of the PM, marched in London's gay pride parade alongside the director of the UK's largest gay rights organization, Stonewall. She waved a pink version of the Union Jack and posed with drag queens, and everybody cheered.

The BBC offers this slideshow of past prides, starting with 2,000 people marching in 1972 bordered by bobbies in those hats and skinny neckties.

Also, on Saturday, the Bishop of Rochester, aka Michael Nazir-Ali, told the Sunday Telegraph that the Church of England could only be straight. He said, "We welcome homosexuals, we don’t want to exclude people, but we want them to repent and be changed." Not that you need more from him, about what is "not normative according to what God has revealed in the Bible," but it's here.

To avoid reinforcing stereotypes of people named Ali being intolerant homophobes, let's end with Lord Waheed Alli, the Muslim multimillionaire who became Britain's youngest openly gay peer at 34 in 1998. His choices for Gay Icons were David Hockney, Princess Diana, Lily Savage, Will Young, the Village People, and Jeff Stryker.

Born July 5: Jean Cocteau

He published his first volume of poetry at nineteen, with thirty more volumes throughout his life. He published seven novels (the best of which is his fifth, Les Enfants Terribles. He wrote twenty-four plays (his twentieth, Le bel indifférent, was created for Edith Piaf and became a towering success). He wrote eleven ballets (his second, Parade, was produced by Diaghilev and designed by Picasso). He wrote six operas. He was a graphic designer, a clothes designer, and an interior designer. He painted. He drew. He photographed. He managed a professional boxer, who became the sport's first Hispanic world champion. He was an actor. And he made six feature films, two of which happen to be among the most lauded in the history of cinema, La belle et la bête and Orphée, both of which star his boyfriend, superstar idol Jean Marais. God only knows where Jean Cocteau found the inspiration, or the time. He also dated Edouard Dermit, whom he adopted, the boxer “Panama” Al Brown, whom he managed, a few women including Natalie Paley, whom he impregnated, and the fifteen-year-old writing prodigy Raymond Radiguet, who may or may not have been something of an opportunist when it came to dating. Cocteau died in 1963 from complications of a heart attack, at seventy-four, an hour after learning of Edith Piaf’s death.

Smalltown, Red State, Gay-Inclusive Fourth of July Parade

If you need a reminder that America really is changing, check out these three photos of the PFLAG contingent in our smalltown Alaskan Fourth of July parade. They were possibly the most populous group marching today, certainly the most awesome, and they received the same happy applause as everyone else. The only cause for concern: very few children recognized the 26th president below, who rode the streets asking, "Do you know who I am?"

 

Louis Bayard Slams Martina's "Homophobic" Divorce Strategy

Writing in Salon, novelist Louis Bayard regrets having to blast Martina Navratilova, who has done so much for sports, women in sports, and lesbian visibility, for aggressively taking "advantage of a legal double standard that is both sexist and homophobic" in her divorce from Toni Layton. As you know, this isn't Martina's first high-profile split, nor is it the first time she's argued in court that same-sex relationships are nothing like a marriage. In 1991, after ending her partnership with Judy Nelson, Martina's lawyers in a pre-trial meeting portrayed their relationship as prostitution, claiming they "had had a contract for sex" and "therefore [it was] against public policy" according to another ex, Rita Mae Brown.

Bayard argues:

"What was cynical then has become indefensible now. Martina Navratilova can no longer cast herself as an apostle for gay rights while using a homophobic legal code to deny her ex-partners alimony. This is more than bad behavior, it is bad precedent. And it comes at the worst possible time.

"Very soon -- sooner than anyone could have guessed -- gay marriage will become the law in much of the land. A great deal has been written about whether straight America is ready; less has been written about whether gay America is ready. Not just to be held to the same contractual standards as heterosexual couples but to believe (after years of being told otherwise) that their relationships really are of equal standing. And to go on believing it when those relationships collapse.

"...If we want our relationships to be taken seriously, if we want the legal sanction of marriage, we must be ready to stand by our contracts and our obligations -- no matter how expensive or inconvenient it is and no matter what example is set by our culturally designated "heroes." Equality has its blessings. It also has its price."

Complicated. (Pre-nup?) In addition to wanting to keep her money, Martina may feel it's a bit much to ask her to forfeit millions now to make a point about the "deeply inhospitable" Florida legal system that gave her no benefits or security of couplehood when they were together. We know she's mad. She had Toni forcibly removed from their property and denied her access to her belongings. And she's about to get madder. Toni's lawyer publicly threatened to reveal "many dark secrets from Navratilova's past and present life ...such as the intrigue surrounding arch-rival Chris Evert, the incestuous nature of the Women's Tennis Association, former lovers, improprieties between business associates, and more."

I think Bayard is wrong in his assertion that public opinion would be with Toni if Martina were a man. That's why we have the term "gold digger." Besides, fans always side with the famous person. But he could be right about precedent, or at least raising the public profile. Things that have long existed out of the spotlight don't penetrate our culture until they've happened to a celebrity: aids needed Rock Hudson, bulimia needed Princess Diana, African adoption needed Angelina Jolie, public sex needed George Michael, voguing needed Madonna, etc.

1,001

My 1,001st post. Shouldn't we celebrate with a big Arabian night? Give Scheherazade a rest.
Thanks for reading.

Object of Desire by William J. Mann

Published this week, William J. Mann's new novel, Object of Desire, is about Danny Fortunato a 41 year-old former go-go boy still haunted by his sister Becky's disappearance when he was 14. Although he's long been married to Frank who's nearing 60, he falls for an ultra hot young bartender named Kelly who may hold some clue to Becky's fate. Now he'll have to face buried secrets and confront his fractured family to get the truth. Mann has been praised for his deft evocation of his hometown Palm Springs (as well as his summer home of Provincetown) and for depicting the struggles of its aging gay population. Publishers Weekly called Object of Desire "ambitious if uneven" and said, "Mann's vivid style is a treat, and though the contemporary story line flirts with romantic overkill, the flashbacks dealing with Becky's disappearance are particularly well done and could almost stand on their own." Read a new interview with Mann by Tim Miller here.

I haven't read Mann's fiction, possibly because they're marketed as circuit party lit, but I love his biographies and nonfiction. He is especially important for having rescued gay movie star and decorator William Haines from obscurity and for illuminating Katharine Hepburn's same sex affairs. His next film bio, coming October 21, looks like his biggest yet, How To Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood.

Thank You, India. Thank You, Consequence.

India's high court finally overturned the 1861 law banning homosexual acts between consenting adults. Although technically the ruling applies only to Delhi it will have enormous consequences throughout the nation. In the best scenario, the government now will repeal the law for the entire country. Read the reports from the Times of London and the NYT.

When you hear the phrase "gay activists" do you think of the women above? Adnan Abidi captured their jubilation in this Reuters photo, my new favorite picture.

In anticipation of the such an outcome, in May India's only gay magazine, Bombay Dost, went back in print after a seven year hiatus. The big comeback issue includes a year in review section, stories about bloggers, bi people, "the lesbian continuum," possible arranged gay marriages, something called "straights' corner," and a list of 100 gay Indian films.

Michael Cunningham's Lineup: Slasher Pic, Literary Novel, Monster Movie

Rebounding from the relative lows of his novel Specimen Days and his screenplay for Evening, Michael Cunningham told Variety "this summer, I will finish a novel," which elsewhere has been identified as a contemporary story set in New York. The reason he was talking to the industry rag is that he just sold his script for a slasher movie to Screen Gems, the Sony studio behind Underworld, Hostel, Obsessed and Lakeview Terrace. Cunningham's movie, Beautiful Girl, is about a formerly fat high school student who returns for senior year skinny and flirts with her male English teacher who then kills anybody who was ever mean to her. Cunningham said after completing his novel, "my plan is to then write another idea I have for an actual monster movie."

The Guardian Gets Its Bi On: Top 10 Literary Menage a Trois

As you in the lower 48 prepare for the onslaught of Bruno, remember, before there was Borat, there was Jean Girard in Talladega Nights. Correctly enumerating a few of France's cultural gifts to the world, he said, "We invented democracy, existentialism, and menage a trois." Now, English novelist Ewan Morrison continues the Guardian's series of literary top 10s with his favorite books featuring menage a trois. The way I've always done it understood it, menage a trois is synonymous with threesome, but technically it means "household of three" and refers to three people living together who are each involved with one another though not necessarily all together in bed at the same time. Unforgivably, Morrison appears to confuse the term with love triangle. Nevertheless, you'll enjoy his list, which swings both ways: fiction and nonfiction. Of his choices, my favorites are Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World and Hemingway's novel of expats in the South of France, The Garden of Eden, which might be considered the perfect Hemingway for people who think they don't like Hemingway. The youngish male novelist gets topped by a woman and admonishes himself the morning after to admit he liked it. She crops her hair short to look like him and they wear identical men's clothes.

Coincidentally, The Garden of Eden was my family's first ever summer book. Now in its 24th year, our summer book for 2009 is Sybille Bedford's A Legacy. If you're unfamiliar with this old school British lesbian (1911-2006), read the New Yorker's appreciation of her work and get ready to fall in love.

Gay Horror Anthology Wins Bram Stoker Award

Last month the Horror Writers Association announced the winners of their 22nd annual Bram Stoker Awards, where Stephen King won two awards, for novel and story collection, and Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder was honored for Superior Achievement in Anthology. (The horrorists want to promote excellence, not emphasize competition, so they avoid the term "best.") The twenty-three scary lgbt stories collected here are:

Emmeline by C. J. Lines    
The Bloomsbury Nudes by Jameson Currier  
Epistle of the Sleeping Beauty by Jan Vander Laenen  
Cask by Jude Wright      
Black Annis by Joy Marchand    
Memento Mori by Elissa Malcohn    
The Shallows by Gary McMahon    
I Am the Shadow That Walks There by Michelle Scalise  
Bluff by L. A. Fields
In Her Mirrors, Dimly by Maria Alexander
The Portico Angel by Kevin W. Reardon  
Vourdalak by Michael Hacker
Memory Box by Reesa Brown
Double Walker by Lisa Morton  
Sublet by Rick R. Reed
I’m Your Violence by Lee Thomas
The Engine of Desire by Livia Llewellyn  
The Boys of Bald Cave by C. Michael Cook
Prayers of the Living by Erin MacKay
The Next Big Thing by Christopher Fox
The Shaping by Scott Nicholson
A Letter from Phoenix by Kealan Patrick Burke
The Agathas by Sarah Langan  

Congratulations to the out editors: Liaguno's first novel, The Literary Six, was an lgbt homage to 80s slasher films. Chad Helder has published a book of poetry and a horror comic book. And kudos to Dark Scribe Press. I don't like the pink skeleton on the cover but I love the same-sex couples being dorks rather than hot! college! jocks! Also, their one minute six second book trailer is sort of charming and endearing in its simplicity.

Born July 1: Farley Granger

According to his autobiography, Include Me Out, 40's and 50's movie star Farley Granger joined the Navy at 19 and on his first voyage, from San Francisco to Honolulu, was seasick the whole way losing 23 pounds and needing to be hospitalized when they reached land. Thus it was that the almost too pretty Granger spent the war onshore in Hawaii, working the enlisted men's club on Waikiki Beach or helping entertain the troops under the command of the never-married Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans best known as Samantha's campy warlock father on Bewitched. Granger claims that while in Honolulu, in one memorable night, he had his first sexual experiences with a woman (a "hostess" a private club) then with a man (an enlisted officer who picked him up at that club). Obviously a star, within four years he had a lead role in Alfred Hitchcock's gay film Rope, based on the Leopold - Loeb murder and written by awesome Arthur Laurents, whom he dated for the year during filming and after. Later Granger had affairs with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, and filmed his biggest hit, again with Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, the lesbian author of the Mr. Ripley novels.

Granger's career faltered through the 50s, including a disastrous Broadway musical version of Pride & Prejudice in which he played Mr. Darcy. Early in the 60s he joined the National Repertory Theatre and fell in love with its production manager, Robert Calhoun. They were together 45 years and, possibly an even greater test of endurance, wrote Granger's memoir together. Granger discussed Rope in the documentary based on Vito Russo's stunning book, The Celluloid Closet, but please don't call him a gay hero. Speaking with Granger in a bizarre 2007 interview, Calhoun said, “And ‘gay’ — in itself, destruction of a perfectly good word — is just another way of saying faggot.” During the same exchange, Granger confirmed the interviewer's statement that "you’ve never actually been in the closet" with, “No, I never was.” Calhoun died last year. Granger is 84 today. For another look at that era, you might consider Arthur Laurents' excellent memoir, Original Story By.

Independent Ranks UK's 101 Power Gays: Mandelson, Fry, McKellan

                                                                                                                                                               (photo The Telegraph)

For readers who count on me to report the obvious: the UK has gone wild for gay 100 lists.

The British newspaper the Independent on Sunday has released its tenth annual Pink List, ranking the 101 most powerful LGBT people in the United Kingdom. Unlike here, the gays in Britain (and in France) hold top cabinet positions in government. This year's number one, Peter Mandelson, is Secretary of State for Business and more recently added the title First Secretary of State which the Independent translates as "Deputy Prime Minister in all but name." Furthermore, they consider Lord Mandelson "arguably the most powerful individual in the country." (Meanwhile, we're expected to be grateful for the Director of OPM.)

Ranked second and third on the 2009 Pink List are actors / activists Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan. Historian and frequent television face David Starkey is fourth. The highest ranked lesbian, in the fifth spot, is post-punk rocker Beth Ditto, a choice that itself is a little punk, considering she's an American.

In sixth place is writer Alan Bennett, seventh is director Phyllida Lloyd (responsible for many English operas, East End plays, and her first movie Mamma Mia!), eighth is Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw, ninth is poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and tenth is Nick Bowles, head of implementation for the conservative party.

To see all 101 rankings, you have to click through their slideshow person by person.

UK's Lesbian & Gay Foundation Names 100 Best LGBT Blogs in English

Britain's Lesbian and Gay Foundation has released its list of 100 best lgbt blogs. They write: "LGF online have scoured the internet to bring you the most informative, entertaining and inspiring blogs from around the world. The blogs we've chosen cover diverse issues from all sides of the LGBT equation. There's blogs from gay parents, gay conservatives, gay activists, young people coming out, older people coming out, and gay asylum seekers to name but a few."

The list is unranked and not alphabetical, but if you scroll down you'll find some very worthy familiar names including Towleroad, Pam's House Blend, and Joe My God. Read them all and find some new favorites.

Born June 28: Dave Kopay

Thirty-four years ago when Dave Kopay became the first former NFL player to come out, the newspaper that ran the groundbreaking interview (The Washington Star) and tv newscasts that reported the story, received vociferous hate mail. Kopay had played eight years for San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, New Orleans, and Green Bay. Since 1975, he has been an enormous inspiration through his lectures, public appearances, and especially with the publication of his 1977 memoir The David Kopay Story which was a New York Times bestseller. However, the NFL has ignored him. To this day, they will not even hire him to be a diversity speaker to the league. And the total number of former NFL players to come out in the thirty-two years since Kopay said he’s gay is two: Roy Simmons in 1992 and Esera Tuaolo in 2002. Unable to get any sort of coaching job, Kopay worked for twenty years at his uncle’s flooring business, Linoleum City, in Hollywood. He has been involved with several sessions of Gay Games, most recently administering the Participants’ Oath in Chicago. A real hero, he announced he's leaving one million dollars to the University of Washington's Q Center.

Queer and Unavailable Lives Up to Name, and Rocks

Kenny Mellman couldn't show the movie clips he wanted to at Thursday's screening in the 92Y Tribeca's ongoing Queer/Art/Film series because he said he couldn't get them, even when he went directly to the filmmakers. So he presented an evening of tv clips (Queer and Available?), starting with two Pet Shop Boys video clips directed by Derek Jarman, It's a Sin and Rent. Next came scenes from an episode of MTV's series "Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes" starring Debbie Harry, Jerry Hall, a young Lady Bunny, and a really wonderful segment with John Kelly as himself backstage and as Dagmar Onasis in the spotlight. (Be mesmerized by a different clip of him as her here.) (Kelly presented an earlier night in the series, showing Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.) Mellman ran a clip of Wayland Flowers on a cable access show in which Madame could speak uncensored and her exuberantly filthy talk was a camp revelation, as was Flowers' manipulation of her form. Shockingly expressive for a hard plastic puppet. A toned-down but no less sex obsessed Madame also appeared in the night's highlight, a screening of "The Beatrice Arthur Special," filmed in 1979 and aired in 1980, co-starring Rock Hudson and Melba Moore. One skit of a widow talking to her husband's casket featured his two mistresses and ended with the surprise of his male lover, but all the sequences had queer undertones of varying degrees. Check out this gospel revival number by Sistah Love and friends.

The series continues this Thursday withLisa Kron presenting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, July 16 with Thomas Allen Harris screening Tongues United, and Sarah Schulman showing Chantal Ackerman's overtly lesbian film from 1974, Je, Tu, Il, Elle.

Please turn off your computer, leave your apartment, and support innovative series like this one co-curated by Adam Baran and the superb film director Ira Sachs. The night I attended the audience was five people.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Smartly extending and expanding the tradition of character driven literature and domestic comedies of manners, Stephen McCauley has written five novels, the best of which is True Enough and the best known, The Object of My Affection. You must also read his riveting, knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us. The anthology features twenty-five writers including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Allan Gurganus, Tim Miller, Carl Phillips, and Michael Nava. McCauley took the spring semester off from teaching in order to work on (finish?) his sixth novel. Pray that the fact that he hasn't updated his website since January is a sign that he's been immersed in his fiction. His last posting:

"Have been pissed off at success of beloved yoga studio, which somehow or other seems like bad karma. Classes that once topped off at 10 or 15 students now up 50. Considerable problems with humidity, given that room is heated to 98 degrees. Like being inside steamy, subtropical germ incubator while instructor extols health benefits of exercises. Raised issue of crowding with instructor who shrugged it off. “New Year’s resolutions. It happens every January.” Happy to hear this since most such resolutions have shelf life of about 2 to 3 weeks. Left studio feeling relieved that cigarettes and booze would probably reclaim bulks of the crowd before February. Then had to deal with guilt and bad karma about mean-spirited relief.

"Kindle envy resolved in most satisfactory way. Trollope book arrived in the mail 24 hours after placing order. Started reading it and having trouble putting it down. Amusing, vivid, unaffected, and insightful. Best of all, love the way 900 pages feel in the hand and pleasing creasing of binding as reading progresses.

"Economizing going well, but as this is New Year’s resolution, will undoubtedly meet fate of nonsmoking and stop-drinking resolutions of annoying yoga students. Which could mean will be unable to afford yoga classes at exact moment overcrowding finally subsides. Karma?"

His website also offers in full his story "The Whole Truth," which was longlisted for the Best American Short Stories 1992, his NYT essay on Antwerp, an essay called "In the Greenhouse," and a fourth piece called "At the Threshold."

Gay Liberation Front Reunion at NYPL

 
left to right: Karla Jay, Allen Young, Steven Dansky, Ellen Shumsky, Jerry Hoose, Perry Brass, Jim Fouratt, Michela Griffo, and Fran Winant. Mark Segal participated via Skype. [click to enlarge]

Gay life wouldn't be any fun if it weren't complex, right? Reuniting on stage at the NYPL, ten original members of the Gay Liberation Front shared memories from forty years ago of the Stonewall Inn, the rebellion, and their bold if short-lived activist group. Many took issue with the way the bar "has been so romanticized, especially in David Carter's book," when in fact the place was "dreary, dreadful" or "the worst, a sewer."

The panel's early visions of equality and societal transformation were undeniably inspiring. "Rejection of conventional sex roles" and "GLF defied control and disrupted the patriarchy," were two points Steven Dansky made, and several people quoted the essay "Woman Identified Woman." Yet those ideals only served to depress anyone who contrasted them with the limited talking points of today's lgbt organizations. Perhaps not unrelated, many speakers discussed how the GLF's conflicts in 1969 and the early 70s were not only gay vs. straight but also gay vs. gay.

With a historian's perspective and balance, Karla Jay said they wouldn't be there without their predecessors, naming several earlier gay groups, civil rights leaders, feminists, and especially the anti-war movement. Yet she also recalled that after the first of what would be four nights of riots, it was the Mattachine Society that put up a poster outside Stonewall commanding people to "behave," which was "further infuriating." Jim Fouratt, while praising Harry Hay, said in the aftermath of the riots the dress-code obsessed Mattachine was planning a candlelight walk around the Village "to show what good people we are" whereas he, a Timothy Leary radical, wanted full on revolution. Fouratt said "Mattachine reported us to the FBI" and did not elaborate. Recalling the scary, exhilarating first Christopher Street Liberation Day March on the first anniversary of Stonewall, Michela Griffo said, "Gays turned their backs on us as we walked up Sixth Avenue. It was the straight people who clapped for us." Yet she also said, "We were never supported by any of the groups we supported, like SDS." And reminded the audience, "Don't vote gay friendly, vote gay."

Perry Brass said "for a long time, especially in the 80s, GLF was seen as an embarrassment," but "now they're coming around." Jim Fouratt said GLF had been left out of the library's huge gay rights exhibit in 1994. Jerry Hoose said he was "annoyed" by how much attention is given to Stonewall and how little to what came in the weeks and months after, drawing applause from the packed audience. 

Ellen Shumsky spoke about the Radical Lesbians and about joining GLF because she "needed to heal my divided self" and also with the "self-chosen mission to document it in photography." Luckily for you, those inspired photos are now on display at the Center. Fran Winant read her moving poem, "Christopher Street Liberation Day, June 28, 1970" which she wrote the morning after.

Allen Young dedicated his remarks to Karla Jay and explained the intentional lack of structure in GLF. He also repeated the most important slogan of the last four decades, "Out of the closet and into the streets."

Congratulations to lgbt coordinator Jason Baumann for a great event.

Morrissey Biography Ranks His Lyrics with Byron, Wilde, Firbank, Larkin

Gavin Hopps, of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, yesterday published a biography of Morrissey that places his work solidly in the tradition of (mainly) British literature. According to the jacket, "In the course of this penetrating study of Morrissey’s oeuvre, Hopps offers close readings of individual lyrics and illuminating comparisons with a range of literary figures – such as Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan and Philip Larkin. Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, at once erudite and accessible, argues convincingly for Morrissey’s inclusion in the pantheon of literary greats."

With twenty-seven years of lyrics, there's certainly potential for a terrific, serious study. Is Hopps up to it? Publishers Weekly found it slightly unloveable: "But Hopps wants to argue that his hero is more than just a pop star: he's 'a radical subversion of the traditional values of pop music' who restored the genre's ability to give voice to dysfunction and alienation. The argument veers from the defensive to the impenetrably academic; the lyrics of one song, for example, are described as 'an unshackling of the referential function of language,' while another is 'an urban parody of the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde.' It's not that Morrissey can't be compared, as he is here, to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Christina Rossetti-or, perhaps most extensively, Samuel Beckett. As a singer and a songwriter, he is by just about any standard a significant artist. But Hopps's enthusiastic appraisal is at times so overwrought that it almost feels as if he's trying to convince himself as much as his academic colleagues of the validity of pursuing a thesis that is not nearly as provocative as it hopes to be."

Born June 25: Larry Kramer, Rictor Norton, George Michael

Larry Kramer was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of Women in Love, losing to Ring Lardner Jr., for M*A*S*H, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Destiny of Me, losing to Tony Kushner for Angels in America. His controversial novel Faggots more or less predicted aids and has sold one million copies, huge for a gay book. He has been hiv+ for more than twenty years (he believes it is thirty years). Kramer is nothing if not a fighter and survivor, although in 1953, as a freshman at Yale, he tried to kill himself by swallowing 200 aspirin. He will be remembered for starting GMHC and ACT-UP, which not only changed the course of aids treatment but utterly transformed the nature of direct action political groups in America. As Michael Specter wrote in his essential profile of Kramer, “Public Nuisance,” in The New Yorker in May 2002, “It is difficult to overstate the impact of ACT UP.” His offer of millions of dollars to endow Yale with a permanent professorship in lgbt studies was rejected, but in 2001 his brother donated $1 million to start the university's Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. It was shut down in 2006. Kramer's long forthcoming opus, The American People, will reclaim the overlooked gay history of everything from Jamestown, George Washington, and Lincoln, to the present day.

In 1972, when almost no universities endorsed gay studies, Rictor Norton published his doctoral dissertation, The Homosexual Literary Tradition. Since then, he has illuminated gay history through several books including the seminal Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830, and My Dear Boy, a collection of gay love letters through the centuries. He maintains a terrific website devoted to gay history. Having lived in the United Kingdom since the early 1970s, in 2005 Norton formed a civil union with his partner of thirty years.

Tight jeans, a black leather jacket, blond highlights, one big earring, three days’ stubble, and five or six killer hooks. With these weapons Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou conquered a decade. As late as 1995 Londoners voted that their favorite song of all time was Careless Whisper. Say what you will but, George Michael knows his way around a pop song. He has had twelve #1 hits in Britain, ten #1 singles in the United States, and has sold more than 85 million records worldwide. Long before Eminem or Justin Timberlake, George Michael was the first white male to top the black music charts, the first white male to duet with Aretha Franklin, and Wham! was the first Western pop act to tour China. His first serious boyfriend was the Brazilian designer Anselmo Feleppa, who died of aids within two years of their meeting. Although George Michael remained closeted to the public, Feleppa’s death spurred him to come out to his family and to write his #1 hit song Jesus to a Child. The entire cd Older is dedicated to Feleppa’s memory. For the past eleven years, George Michael has been in a relationship with Texan Kenny Goss. Although his career may have waned in the United States, he remains hugely popular overseas. Earlier this month he became the first singer to perform at the new Wembley Stadium for 70,000 fans and on New Year’s Eve 2008 he was paid $3 million dollars to perform a one hour set in Moscow for 300 guests of Vladimir Potanin. Allegedly a new album is on its way, though it has been 18 years since he topped the US charts.

Food, Inc., The Proposal, Whatever Works

The important new documentary Food, Inc. isn't sickening in the way you expect: the scenes of chicken coops and slaughterhouses are brief and not as bad as they've appeared in other media. What's stomach turning is the way corporations have gotten the government to make it illegal to criticize, discuss, or even accurately label the way food is made today. Another dark corner we've turned is that for the first time companies can patent their new hybrids of crops, so suddenly for farmers to do the simple, thrifty task of saving their natural seed's from one year's crop to plant the next season is now theft. Monsanto employs a division of 75 people who investigate and prosecute farmers, often ratted out by their neighbors who report them saving seed. These struggling individuals are themselves a vanishing breed. As the Southern woman who on her own raises massive numbers of hormone-fed chickens says, "This isn't farming. It's factory work." Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser provide excellent, articulate commentary throughout, some of which is actually hopeful. Last year Wal-Mart followed Starbucks, Safeway, and Kroger in banning milk from cows injected with a synthetic growth hormone. The use of bovine growth hormones was already illegal in Canada and Europe.

I reached a milestone of sorts in Wyoming over the weekend, seeing myself portrayed on screen by Ryan Reynolds. In the otherwise skippable The Proposal, he plays someone who works in book publishing and divides his time between Manhattan and Alaska. The utter inauthenticity of the Alaskan characters is matched only by the ludicrous fantasy version of the publishing industry. Do not go thinking at least you can enjoy it as a travelogue: the role of "Sitka, Alaska" was played by Rockport, Massachusetts. 

You might reasonably think after my years of criticizing Woody Allen for erasing gay men from his vision of New York that I'd watch Whatever Works just to see Ed Begley's character. Wrong. Not going to endure his contrived romance between Allen-stand-in Larry David and a Soon-Yi stand-in young woman 41 years his junior. (Besides, it sounds like Begley is straight and his coming out is what passes for a punchline.) If you go, let me know.

Seven Minute Clip from PBS's Upcoming Documentary on Stonewall

From left: Susan Bellows, David Carter, David Heilbroner, Kate Davis, Martin Boyce

Last night I attended what was billed as a preview clip of a work in progress of the American Experience's forthcoming documentary on Stonewall. The filmmakers were at pains to say this 7-minute sample of talking heads (Stonewall patrons, the arresting police officer, historians, awesome Virginia Apuzzo) was merely a "pastiche," a "taste" of the 90-minute broadcast planned for April 2010. They also promised that the final version would put the riots in "context," though in amplifying that, the wife and husband directing team of Kate Davis and David Heilbroner mentioned only the "incredible archival trove of homophobia" and pervasive anti-gay views across America at the time. During the clip and the lengthy discussion, no one ever referenced Harry Hay, ONE, Phyllis & Del, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, ECHO, the picketing of the White House and Philadelphia's City Hall, or any other gay history prior to 1969. Stonewall is an essential, explosive midpoint in the timeline of gay rights, but the filmmakers will commit a crushing injustice if they cast it as the birth of the movement.

For seventeen years before the riots, organized gay groups fought for gay equality, published gay magazines, won Supreme Court cases (1958), held national gay conferences (1960), successfully lobbied state legislatures to rescind their sodomy laws (1962), and promoted gay visibility, protesting publicly against anti-gay discrimination (1965). To erase these landmark achievements by claiming that the gay rights movement began with a bar brawl is to disgrace those pioneers and history itself. God knows bravery wears many outfits and symbols are powerful, but the drag queens and Stonewall regulars fighting police and doing chorus line kicks while singing, "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls," mustn't obliterate their less cinematic, more scholarly forerunners.

A main source for the series is David Carter and his book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, which does acknowledge the earlier activists.

Among director Kate Davis's many documentaries is Southern Comfort about a FTM trans man dying of ovarian cancer who falls in love with a MTF. Rigorously avoiding sensationalism and stereotype, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2001. Her statement for the DVD begins, "This June marks the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In June of 1969, for the first time, transgendered and gay youth fought back against the police because they were fed up with oppression..."

American Experience producer Susan Bellows mentioned that the series has created 275 films over the years, and I asked her how many of those dealt with gay life. She said this was the first. She asked if I thought there was a particular event in American history they'd missed. Feeling that 1 in 275 inadequately represents lgbt contributions to society, I said, "Well, there are people--" She nodded. "Right," she said. "We haven't done Harvey Milk." Subjects of previous films are zydeco music and Tupperware.

Born June 23: Alan Turing

Anyone calculating the cost of Britain's horrific homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to a field of mathematical biology called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White.

Broadway Bares 19

If you missed last night's annual cavalcade of charitable skin at Roseland, Broadway Bares, you can relive the magic thanks to After Elton.

Also, you really should get the fully illustrated coffee table book, Backstage Pass: Broadway Bares, which covers the first seventeen shows. Happily, almost every scene from each season is more imaginative than football players in pads and jocks and socks.

Born June 20: E. Lynn Harris

In 1990, no publisher would take a chance on a first novel about a man torn between his girlfriend and his secret boyfriend, all of them black. Undaunted, the author, a successful IBM salesman who was used to breaking barriers, having been the first black editor of the yearbook at the University of Arkansas and the first black male Razorbacks cheerleader, decided to publish it himself. At black bookstores, book clubs, and beauty salons around Atlanta, he sold thousands of copies to gay men and straight women. A local sales rep mentioned the book’s popularity to the publisher of Anchor/Doubleday, which quickly republished that novel, Invisible Life, and all ten subsequent books by the phenomenal E. Lynn Harris. Every one of his books has been a bestseller. His sixth and seventh novels, Not a Day Goes By and Any Way the Wind Blows both debuted at #2 on the New York Times list. His author events regularly attract 900 people or more. Upbeat, optimistic, and romantic, his books never gloss over life’s struggles and pain. His memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, included his own coming out story as well as bouts with depression, drinking, low self-esteem, and a suicide attempt just before he decided to start writing. His most recent novel, Basketball Jones whose paperback edition is coming in August, confronts homophobia and double lives in the NBA. To date his books have sold more than four million copies.

Day Hike in Wyoming's Absaroka Range

An afternoon of sagebrush and birdsong along a very vocal river. No other hikers the entire time. Eventually, inevitably, my thoughts turned to Annie Proulx. And the importance of being visible. You'll remember it was because she saw an older guy in a Wyoming bar interested in a good looking ranch hand that she suddenly thought, "Country gay." And then she wrote Brokeback Mountain.

All in all a gorgeous day, but here you're never far from the mindset below.

Born June 19: James I

If anyone deserves the designation Father of our Country, isn’t it James I, who granted the Virginia Company charter 126 years before George Washington was born and for whom both Jamestown and the King James Bible are named?

When his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was pregnant with him, his father successfully plotted to murder her private secretary. Within months of James’s birth, his father was killed, and three months after that his mother married the likely assassin, which hastened her falling popularity. She was forced to abdicate and James assumed the Scottish throne at age one. When he was fourteen, he fell in love with Esme Stewart, 1st Duke of Lennox, who was thirty-eight, and accordingly to eyewitness accounts, was “in such love with him as in the open sight of the people oftentimes he will clasp him about the neck with his arms and kiss him." The disapproving Scottish nobles first made Lennox choose between James and his Catholicism (he chose James) then eventually forced Lennox to flee to France.

In 1603, when Elizabeth I died and James became King of England, his exploits with men were well known and Londoners snidely said, “Elizabeth was King, now James is Queen.” Right away he faced two conspiracies against him, the Bye Plot and the Main Plot, in which Sir Walter Raleigh and many others were arrested. Within two years James also faced the massive Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, commemorated annually as Guy Fawkes Day. In 1607, the same year Jamestown was founded, he attended a jousting tournament where, upon seeing Robert Carr, seventeen, thrown from a horse and break his leg, James fell in love. James made Carr a gentleman of the bedchamber and gave him many gifts, including, some years later, divorce papers for the married woman he loved, Frances Howard, and as a wedding present, the title 1st Earl of Somerset. Alas, Carr preferred his wife to James, even when it was revealed she had poisoned his best friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who had been against their marriage. To save her, Carr threatened to reveal his sexual relationship with James at the trial; he didn’t. His wife confessed, they were both sentenced to die, but instead James held them in the tower for seven years then pardoned them and gave them an estate in the country. Around this time, 1614, he had fallen in love with George Villiers, whom he later made 1st Duke of Buckingham. The contemporary playwright and poet Théophile de Viau wrote

Apollo with his songs
debauched young Hyacinthus,
And it is well known that the king of England
fucks the Duke of Buckingham.

Faithful to the end, Buckingham was at his side when James died in 1625.

Queer/Art/Film Thursdays at 92Y Tribeca

Queer/Art/Film a series of movies introduced by gay filmmakers and performers is ongoing at the 92 Y in Tribeca in June and July. According to their website:

"Curated by Butt magazine contributing editor Adam Baran and filmmaker Ira Sachs, the series invites some of the most exciting, innovative (and homosexual) artists from the dance/performance/film/visual and literary arts to present and discuss their favorite films, in rare prints, on the big screen!

"QUEER/ART/FILM asks the question: How does film create a link from one queer generation to the next, from John Kelly to Jean Cocteau, from 8 1/2 to Paris is Burning, from Marlon Riggs to Chantal Akerman, from Kiki & Herb to the Five Lesbian Brothers, to…..you! Join us every Thursday at 7:30pm in June and bi-weekly in the months to follow, to explore these unexpected pathways from one artist to the next, lively excavations of history and queerest of cinematic events."

Tonight Jennie Livingston introduces 8 1/2. Next week Kiki & Herb's Kenny Mellman hosts an evening called "Queer and Unavailable."

An Old Friend Stopped By For 90 Minutes Last Night

 
Because I'm away so much, there's considerable confusion about just whose yard this is. "Somebody" wanted to solve it by weight. I voted for opposable thumbs. To be continued, I'm sure.

Washington Post Book Critic Erases Nearly All New Gay Titles

Who needs glitches from Amazon when one of the nation's leading book reviewers informs a curious reader that basically there are no new gay books? The Washington Post's "Summer Reading Issue" features a Q&A section to solve life's eternal question, What should I read?, including this exchange:

Anonymous: What are new gay books that are recommended?

Dennis Drabelle: Does it have to be a new gay book? Not many of these are being published anymore, mostly, I think, because the great gay storyline -- coming out -- isn't such a big deal anymore and has been done to death. But here's a classic you may not have read: Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us, set in an English boarding school. You can find used copies online, and it's well worth doing. A masterpiece!

Disappointing, insulting, and untrue. It's really shocking that Drabble has to reach back 42 years to 1967 for a suggestion of "a new gay book." A more helpful answer might have steered readers toward the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the ALA gay book prize, and the revamped Alyson Books. As for specifically new gay titles (in hardcover or paperback), 2009 has seen NYT bestsellers from Andrew Sean Greer, E. Lynn Harris, and Tom Rob Smith, as well as widely praised reads from Stacey D'Erasmo, Ali Smith, Christopher Rice, Peter Cameron, Benjamin Taylor, P. E. Ryan, James Hannaham, Dennis Cooper, Frank Polito, Neil Plakcy, Elinor Lipman, Dale Peck, and Alex Sanchez.

Born June 17: Barry Manilow

When you think of early Bette Midler, singing for the gay men at the Continental Baths, do you think of Barry Manilow? He was her piano accompanist, helped produce her first two albums, and directed the music on her Divine Miss M Tour. At the time, he was a successful advertising jingle writer and musical director of the CBS show Callback. On tour, during Midler's intermission Manilow performed three songs from his first album, but it wasn't until Clive Davis saw him open for Dionne Warwick that his luck really changed. Davis and a reluctant Manilow fought about including Mandy on his second album; Davis won; hit after superhit followed: It's a Miracle, I Write the Songs, Tryin To Get the Feeling Again, Looks Like We Made It, Can't Smile Without You, Even Now, and of course Copacabana, which was so popular it inspired a TV movie starring Barry ("His name was Tony...") Twenty-odd years later Manilow still enjoys a large and devoted following. He headlines at the Las Vegas Hilton and Oprah says he's one of her most requested guests. Manilow has lived with his manager Garry Kief for more than twenty years in homes they share in Bel Air and Palm Springs.

What Midnight Looks Like

Larry Kramer Reviews UK Book on Sex Between Men in Age of Reform

Today on the Huffington Post Larry Kramer reviews Charles Upchurch's Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform, calling the work "very important," "breathtaking," and describing his "grateful amazement" at the breadth of scholarship. Upchurch combed legal documents and newspapers to collect more than one thousand cases of men having sex with men in Britain between 1800 - 1870.

Kramer spends much of his review deriding the "gobbledygook theorizing" of queer studies (as opposed to gay history) but he does also discuss Upchurch's work:

"The amazing thing, of course, when his 'findings' are excavated and exposed to the bright air of daylight, it can be seen that all this information has been there since it was created, in the files of The Times, in the court records of cases that The Times and other papers reported, quite often rather non- judgmentally, it is also interesting to note. Men accused of sodomy, attempted sodomy, of "indecent assault," at various times punishable by death, of cross dressing, of hustling, of cruising, of trying to set up house, of cohabiting in any way, of trying just to say Hello, oh all those things that gay men know all about and take for granted today."

Obama Administration on Gay Rights, "From Silence to Outright Hostility"

Until last week, the main things the Obama administration had done for gay rights were:

1. An lgbt marching band in the Inaugural parade
2. Hillary extending partner benefits to state department diplomats
3. A gay pride proclamation that among other things wrongly claimed Obama was the first to appoint an lgbt person to a senate-approved position in his first 100 days [actually it was Clinton nominating Roberta Achtenberg in 1993]

Even though candidate Obama campaigned to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, President Obama's Department of Justice filed a brief last Thursday to uphold the law. In that brief, they compared gay marriage to incest and to adults marrying children. They said they had to defend the law. Lawyers at AmericaBlog proved they did not have to. Then Richard Socarides, the former White House official, weighed in with a great essay, writing, "I was equally troubled by the administration’s explanation that they had no choice but to defend the law. As an attorney and as someone who was directly involved in giving advice on such matters to another president... I know that this is untrue."

He continued:

I know and accept the fact that one of the Department of Justice's roles is to (generally) defend the law against constitutional attack. But not in all cases, certainly not in this case – and not in this way. To defend this brief is to defend the indefensible.

From my experience, in a case where, as here, there are important political and social issues at stake, the president’s relationship with the Justice Department should work like this: The president makes a policy decision first and then the very talented DOJ lawyers figure out how to apply it to actual cases. If the lawyers cannot figure out how to defend a statute and stay consistent with the president’s policy decision, the policy decision should always win out.

Referencing his earlier, galvanizing op-ed "Where Is Our Fierce Advocate?," Socarides wrote:

Now, six weeks later, we seem to have gone from silence to outright hostility, and from our very own Department of Justice.

Yesterday on Rachel Maddow's show, Howard Dean criticized the DOJ brief saying, "It wasn't a little too far. It was a lot too far." A New York Times editorial also blasted the brief and its appalling wording.

The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.

Most appalling of all is openly gay OPM Director John Berry's vigorous defense of the vicious brief. If he lacks the courage to disagree with his boss, at least he could strike a more neutral tone.

So the timing is not great for the DNC's big fundraiser next week asking lgbt Democrats to step up and give major money to the party. Among the many people who have canceled are Alan van Capelle, Andy Towle, and David Mixner, who penned this scath-o-matic post about the brief, saying it could have been written by Pat Robertson and:

You fully need to understand the ramifications of this brief: it undercuts every conceivable argument that the LGBT community would use to fight for the repeal of DOMA.

At this point, the only reason to go near DC is to protest. Get your march on, October 11.